ex & interim

2015-02-16T10:08:00.000-08:00

ex 2011

click on the image below to go to a list of links to artists in the current interim exhibition.

The exhibition will be held at the Vernon Street site of Leeds College Of Art. Opening times are 9.00am until 4pm Monday to Friday. The exhibition is not open to the public at weekends.

ex is part of the exhibitions programme at Leeds College Of Art. Find out more by clicking on the logo below.

ex 2011 introduction

2011-09-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

ex is an annual exhibition profiling a selection of artists at the beginning of their careers. It is selected from the degree shows of fine art graduates who have formerly completed their foundation course at Leeds College of Art. The exhibition was selected by Sean Kaye, Mick Welbourn and Jenny West after visiting fourteen fine art BA shows during May and June 2011.

Nina Wakeford has been invited to write this year’s catalogue essay. Nina is an artist based in London, who studied anthropology and sociology before starting the Leeds College of Art Foundation Course in 2005. Nina showed in ex in 2009, having graduated from Fine Art at Goldsmiths,University of London. She is currently a student on the MFA at Goldsmiths working in film and installation. Her work was shown at the 2010 Russian Biennial of Young Art and at the 23rd New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, as well as at galleries in London including a screening at the Showroom and a solo show at LimaZulu project space.

www.ninawakeford.com

Sean Kaye 2011

essay by Nina Wakeford

2011-09-12T05:30:00.000-07:00

“It’s all just a little bit of history repeating”
Anticipation and preparedness seem ever more a condition of contemporary life. Entire systems of commerce - some of which we now know to be highly dysfunctional – are based on regimes of anticipation and speculation. Yet it is not just inanimate and virtual entities such as houses or financial instruments that are mobilized or created in such systems. Human beings can also be the objects of speculation and investment, and bear the responsibility of anticipation. In the sportswear manufacturer Nike’s “The Girl Effect” campaign, widely disseminated through videos on You Tube, an animation of a generic girl from a developing country is featured to persuade us of the effect of possible charitable donation, first through education, and then through business. We are left with the message “Invest in a girl and she will do the rest”.

Contemporary art is driven by its own conventions of anticipation and senses of possibility, a fact that is everyday knowledge to those who frequent its institutions – galleries, museums, auctions as well as educational establishments. Speculators hover over fine art degree shows, in the shadow of large-scale acquisitions by those such as Charles Saatchi, whose choices
of buying and selling are still widely assumed to make or break careers. Graduating artists offer a sense of potential, perhaps part-realized in the final show, but to be consolidated and accentuated in relation to another, yet-to-be-realized, time – the future.

On first consideration we might not think of the future as the central conceit of ex. Surely gathering together a group of former Foundation Course students is to re-articulate a relationship with the past; re-tethering artists who might have been filled with a sense of possibility ‘on Foundation’, but have long since been let loose on their degree courses and the multiple horizons of the art world. Yet a more complex reworking of temporality is present both in many of the works shown here, as well as forming a context for the mechanics of the show selection and realization. For, in reality, is it hard to see ex outside a process of tacking back and forth between present, past and future. It relies on the anticipatory forces at play at the moment that degree students graduate just as much as it plays on a connection with a past experience. We have in the present time and space – the ‘now’ time of the exhibition – works which cannot (at the very least biographically) be separated from any of these times or forces.

The artist Robert Smithson (1938 -1973) was a prominent advocate of reconsidering how we might move between past, present and future – an interest he furthered through the investigation of entropy. Time, for Smithson, was a tangible and material reality, rather than an abstract concept. “Every object, if it is art,” he wrote, “is charged with the rush of time even though it is static”. Out of this focus he produced works such as the large scale earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970), an intervention in the landscape which is best known not because audiences have seen the work as created – it has been submerged and invisible for decades at a time, and been left to decay and discolor true to Smithson’s commitment to entropy – but through the time-shifted medium of film documentation, and the attempts at re-discovery
by artists such as Tacita Dean (Trying To Find The Spiral Jetty, 1997). Smithson wanted to probe the ways in which the art world thought about, and experienced, time. He was keen to bring forth senses of the distant past as well as the distant future; geological time as much as science fiction. He read Vladimir Nabokov who proclaimed “The future is but the obsolete in reverse”. Materials, artworks, exhibitions – all could be thought of as charged with the rush of time in Smithson’s sense.

Smithson’s aim of an expanded sense of temporality has resonances with ex. ex participants are only ‘ex’ insofar as they have also been considered ‘next’. Educational institutions that promote themselves on past successes (Henry Moore! Damien Hirst!) can also speculatively invest as Leeds College of Art does by sponsoring this exhibition. And furthermore temporality – the lived experience of time – does not flow in one direction only. The Foundation Course is only past if time is understood as flowing in a linear manner. Who is to say that foundation courses are not the new MFA?

In the work that constitutes ex, Sophie Percival’s photographs, force us to juxtapose several temporalities at once, including the time at which the image was captured, the time that the artist has spent modifying the file through Photoshop, and, through this work, the seeming return of the landscape to a time before some of the human interventions were made, constructions which we mentally put back into place and time as we are absorbed in the image. The generic communities which are captured in the temporal shifts of Percival’s images, far removed from Leeds, stand in stark contrast to the portraits taken by Rachel Wilson of her fellow ex participants. Wilson’s practice is meticulously crafted in opposition to the informality of a mobile phone snapshot or a joky Facebook portrait. Together the set of portraits becomes a way to recognize a temporary community of which she is part, framed by the locations where those pictured have created art.

The slice of time of the exhibition is short. Nevertheless Wilson’s photos, in their careful execution and formal presentation, seem to want to extend themselves in time. They capture a moment at a singular location – as any single shot might – but embody the solemn insistence of a record that reaches into some unknown future, perhaps already anticipating comparison: what we looked like then, and now. Anticipating a time elsewhere also features in Catherine Jones’ work, which offers us a glimpse of a narrative that we can imagine as ongoing beyond that which is offered to us here. Where is the setting of the story presented to us, and who is speaking? Is this a narration of past experience, or a fictional future? By using a book form Jones enables us to spirit away this alternative universe of characters, making possible a new space outside the exhibition.

Other work reminds us of an enduring desire to see happenings unfold before us – the time of liveness, of the ‘now’ and the immediate ‘next’. The acknowledgement that our bodies are actively present at the site of viewing is the starting point for Romany Dear’s site-specific work For the next eight minutes, I would like to encourage you to fully embrace absolutely everything. (2011) Instructions delivered via portable cassette player give visitors the opportunity of experiencing the space of the exhibition in unexpected ways. Engrossed in their activities, participants - their bodies hijacked, although seemingly of their own volition - become part of a performance played out in full view of other visitors. The time slot of limelight seems slight - only eight minutes, after all, half the fifteen of fame that Andy Warhol promised - yet the piece reminds us of the capacities of bodies and movement to occupy both space and time, and the fragilities (and perhaps anxieties) which accompany such live activities, which may be interrupted, derailed, or even refused.

Dear’s piece enables us to occupy institutional settings in small groups. However for other works in the show it is the intersubjectivity of two bodies interacting that is brought into focus. Ashanti Harris and Emily Ilett’s video installation captures the flow of energies that move between two bodies as they sense each other in space. Referencing the force of magneticism, the two bodies, eyes closed, are captured on camera bending and straightening as one life force feels and responds to the other. We cannot interrupt their actions as displayed, and one suspects neither could we have swayed them if we had actually been there during filming. Unhurried and attentive, the two bodies appear to be experiencing a time that is theirs alone;
a private rhythm.

Looking on at a pair interacting at close proximity in another time and space is also apparent in the work of Jacob Lomas. Attempting to mirror each other in clothing as well as action, the documentation of Exercises in two, having shed everything unnecessary (2011), shows the literal burdens of connection, dragging a body - is it part of you (it looks the same) or another person? - across the floor. Lomas’ other piece shown here is not merely a pile of grey sacks. This artwork is also, at times, a live performance involving two individuals who steadily rearrange the sacks on the pallet. There are no specific instructions. The performers finish by mutual agreement. The piece could be read as a metaphor for artistic labour – are we just moving generic grey sacks around after all in attempt to find some form, or is this Karl Marx’s alienated labour? In current times maybe it is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but at least there is another human with whom you are sharing the experience!

We are interdependent not only with other living beings, but with objects – as Catherine Jones’ also reminds us in her writing. Think of the everyday portable devices that have almost become part of our bodies, and the senses that have to be alert as they make us aware of their presence. Ellen Twinem’s video is a tangle of objects, people and effects of colour, shape and movement. Shapes appear, people come and go, and yet we are never quite sure who or what is in charge. Is this a video about objects with people as props, or the other way round? New infrastructures gradually emerge, but we are curiously unsure what purpose they might serve. Has this all been done before? Is this a rehearsal or the final action of bringing some new setting into being?

Actions that are repeated might bring forth another temporal regime, that of looping, in which we appear to always be experiencing back the same segment of time, again and again. The behaviour of the female body in Zoe Boston’s video loops us back to earlier feminist video art, in particular Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975). Are we experiencing this time again? No longer the grainy image of early video art, and benefitting from the colour image that highlights red lips and yellow washing up gloves, Boston’s work still retains the defiant gaze of the protagonist as she goes about her task. But rather than using the logic of the alphabetic set, Household Abuse (2011) uses repetition of a single action – pulling until the gloves tear. Far more sinister than a mere demonstration of recurring action, the steady destruction of the gloves takes place as we watch. We are not spared any moment of their fate. We see them being ripped apart, minute after minute. Ex-gloves.

Once the gloves have been torn apart, we can’t imagine how they might be reconstructed. There is no reversing or rewinding for the objects themselves. For Megan Hoyle, on the other hand, taking things apart is the prelude to putting them back together again. Hoyle also repeats her gestures – the careful unpicking of canvas that is then dipped into oil medium before being used to create new forms - but her work has a reparative and generative energy. The process takes time, and Hoyle often produces her work as a performance in the exhibition space, painstakingly unweaving and reconstructing the surfaces which otherwise might be taken for granted. The artist wants us to pause and contemplate, for us to make time to consider the deconstruction and reconstruction. In the rush of the present, perhaps this again is an attempt at pulling the forces of what has been and what is about to be, closer to us. Changing the experience of places is similarly explored by Martha Richardson, in her intervention in the college architecture. Richardson’s work relies on gestures that draw curious attention to themselves. Rather than reparative, these could generate a gentle sense of paranoia. How has the space changed? Was this here yesterday? Will it return to ‘normal’?

Another perspective on the work in ex, although this doesn’t abandon the temporal altogether, is to consider the way in which the group of artists are involved in a system of reciprocity – of giving and taking; ex-change. The books produced by Catherine Jones, available for us to take away, enact art literally as a gift. The generosity of this gesture is of course both on the part of the institution – in supporting the printing – but also on the part of the artist for producing work in this mode. We don’t have to stare at a long text on a wall, perhaps uncomfortably sharing the reading experience with others. Rather we can take the art home.

Nevertheless, gifts, as any anthropologist will tell you, are just as much about establishing or maintaining social relationships as they are about mere physical or financial exchange. For this discipline more important than studying individual behaviour is analyzing the culture of the group – so what of the exhibition as a whole as a gift?
Further remote still from contemporary Leeds than the landscapes of California represented in Percival’s work are the Highlanders of Papua New Guinea as written about by anthropologists in the 1970s. The accounts of how public displays of reciprocity function amongst these peoples came to mind as I considered the circulations of giving and taking which happen at ex. Amongst the Highlanders there was documented a ceremonial gift, called ‘moca’. Moca was a gift not just from one person to another, but from a whole group to another group, and inbuilt in the gift was the obligation to return a moca that was bigger in size. If one group offered a hundred pigs, some birds and a motorbike, then the recipients would have to find even more pigs, birds and motorbikes in return. The aim was to overwhelm an opposing group with your generosity, and to do so publically in a ceremony to which everyone came. Fame and status came from giving the biggest moca possible, and a leader could only assemble one in his lifetime.

The desire to bring such a worlds apart example to bear on a contemporary art exhibition is full of difficulties, not least the impossibility of incorporating the ways in which anthropology itself has now distanced itself from earlier versions of seeing and writing about ‘the other’. However the point is to invoke a system – real or imagined – in which there is gift giving which is public, overwhelming, and, most importantly, that generates a sense of the need to increase the gift given back. This isn’t so remote from ex. The selected artists are giving a collective gift, a wealth of talent, possibility and energy, as well as emerging reputation, back to the institution. They are repaying, but also magnifying, the contributions that they were given. Both groups are, even if tacitly, encouraged to perform their exchange in public. However if we follow the logic of the Highlanders, the challenge that ex poses back to the institution is that the exhibition is not a repayment, but actually calls for another moca. ex points forward into an unfolding future that never quite frees itself from the present or the past.

The word is about, there’s something evolving
Whatever may come, the world keeps revolving
They say the next big thing is here
That the revolution’s near
But to me it seems quite clear
That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating

From “History Repeating” (Propellerheads featuring Miss Shirley Bassey)

rachel wilson

2011-09-12T04:11:00.001-07:00

Rachel Wilson was born in Huddersfield in1989. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2007 and 2008 and at Goldsmiths College, University of London from 2008 to 2011.
She recently exhibited in: Movable Space, CCA, San Francisco, November 2010; Interim, Leeds College of Art, Leeds, 2010; re-construct, BPB Building, Goldsmiths, London, 2009.

ellen twinem

2011-09-12T04:10:00.001-07:00

Ellen Twinem was born in Wakefield in1989. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2007 and 2008 and at Goldsmiths College, University of London from 2008 to 2011.
She recently exhibited in: Firing the Cannon, The Gallery, Dixon Road, London, 2009.

martha richardson

2011-09-12T03:53:00.001-07:00

Martha Richardson was born in Bedford in 1988. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2007 and 2008 and at Edinburgh College of Art from 2008 to 2011.
She recently exhibited in: Lee Joss- Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, 2011; Purl– 303 Copyshop, Edinburgh, 2010; Bluer Than Usual– Lauriston Castle, Edinburgh, 2010.

sophie percival

2011-09-12T03:45:00.000-07:00

Sophie Percival was born in Oxford in 1988. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2007 and 2008 and at Chelsea College of Art & Design from 2008 to 2011.
She recently exhibited in: Transtion Gallery, London, 2011;The Market Estate Project, London, 2010.
Forthcoming exhibitions include: Jotta, London, October 2011 Percival was awarded the Transition Gallery Award 2011 and the Jotta Award 2011.
www.sophiepercival.com

jacob lomas

2011-09-12T03:44:00.001-07:00

Jacob Lomas was born in Derby in 1989. He studied at Leeds College of Art between 2007 and 2008 and at University of Brighton from 2008 to 2011.
He recently exhibited in: CONVERTABLE, The Old Grubbs Diner, Brighton, 2011. His work has been included in the publication Information Architecture.
www.jacoblomas.com

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catherine ailsa jones

2011-09-12T03:29:00.000-07:00

Catherine Ailsa Jones was born in Barnsley in 1988. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2007 and 2008 and at Goldsmiths College, University of London from 2008 to 2011.
She recently exhibited in: New Cross Takeaway, Marquis of Granby, New Cross, London, 2011; TEN, APT Gallery, Deptford, London, 2010; Heterotopia Provocation, Stamford Works, Dalston, London, 2010; Interim, Leeds College of Art, Leeds, 2010.
Forthcoming exhibitions include: Lagoon/Lido, Margate, July 2011.

megan hoyle

2011-09-12T03:28:00.001-07:00

Megan Hoyle was born in Wakefield in 1989. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2007 and 2008 and at Bath School of Art and Design from 2008 to 2011.
She exhibited in: These Words I Seek Are Not My Own, Motorcade/FlashParade, Bristol, 2011; Migration, outdoor exhibition around the Lake and Italian Gardens at Newton Park, Bath, 2010; No Working Title, Touring exhibition travelling to Bath School of Art and Design, Norwich University College of the Arts and Winchester School of Art, 2010; Enslave Your Senses, Chapel Arts Centre, Bath, 2010; Interim, Leeds College of Art, Leeds, 2010; Play, Project Space, Bath, 2010
http://www.meganhoyle.co.uk/
http://meganhoyle.blogspot.com/

ashanti harris & emily ilett

2011-09-12T03:27:00.001-07:00

Ashanti Harris was born in Georgetown, Guyana in 1989 and Emily Ilett was born in Harrogate in 1989. They both studied at Leeds College of Art between 2007 and 2008 and at Glasgow School of Art from 2008 to 2011. Ashanti Harris studied at Universität der Künst Berlin in 2009 whilst Emily Ilett studied at Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen in 2009.
They exhibited in: Live, Platform, Glasgow, 2011; A Cinematic Space; New Territories at the Arches, Glasgow 2011; This is Performance Art Europe; The Ramshorn Theatre, Glasgow, 2011; Touching the Void at Italienska Palatset, Sweden, 2011; Breakfast at the Barras, The Pipe Factory, Glasgow 2011; Speedwork Symposium, Glasgow International Festival, House for an Art Lover, Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, 2010; The Space Between, Galleri Fisk, Bergen, 2010; Interim, Leeds College of Art, Leeds, 2010.
Forthcoming exhibitions include: Windsea, Beacons Festival, Skipton, 2011.

romany dear

2011-09-12T03:19:00.000-07:00

Romany Dear was born in Ormskirk in 1989. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2007 and 2008 and at Glasgow School Of Art from 2008 to 2011. She completed a residency at ARS HAMS. Riihimaki, Finland in 2009.
She exhibited in: Eyebrow Says Relax ‘Where’s the Bovril?’, Barnes Building, Glasgow, 2011; Metamorphosis, Vic Gallery. Glasgow. 2011; Let Blue Move You, Resonace FM, Freize Art Fair, London, 2010; Seven Minutes Of Leg Bending, Hotel Gilchrist, Glasgow, 2010; Instuctions for Everyone- Speedworks Symposium, Glasgow International Festival, House for an Art Lover, Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, 2010; Interim, Leeds College of Art, Leeds, 2010.
Forthcoming exhibitions include: RSA New Contemporaries, The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. Spring 2012; Market Gallery New Graduate Show, Market Gallery Glasgow & Volume Galley, London, 2011/12
Dear was awarded the The Gillian Purvis Award, 2011 and The Harry Meadley Prize, 2008.

zoe boston

2011-09-12T03:13:00.000-07:00

Zoe Boston was born in Wakefield in 1989. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2007 and 2008 and at Manchester Metropolitan University from 2008 to 2011.

Household Abuse - Video still of performance - 2010

Restricted Beauty Regime - Video still of performance - 2010

ex 2011 artists

2011-09-12T02:54:00.000-07:00

zoe boston
romany dear
ashanti harris & emily ilett
megan hoyle
catherine ailsa jones
jacob lomas
sophie percival
martha richardson
ellen twinem
rachel wilson

interim 2011 artists

2011-02-16T10:02:00.000-08:00

georgina bolton
simon bramley
rebecca clark
alexandra culshaw
ellie davies
grace harrison
line
chris macinnes
michaela mckue
jason ramanah

jason ramanah

2011-02-16T09:24:00.000-08:00

Jason Ramanah was born in Huddersfield in 1989. He is currently studying on the BA (Hons) Art Practice course at Goldsmiths, University of London. He completed the Leeds College of Art Foundation programme in 2009.

He recently exhibited in Selective Pressure, Life Bar, London, 2009; Derivelab, Centre for Creative Collaboration, London, 2010; Q-Art Presents 11, APT Galley, London, 2010; Taking the Matter into Common Hands, The Mews Project Space, London, 2011.

Jason Ramanah’s work SHIT is a search for individual integrity and honesty. He is interested in the possibility of a physical engagement with thought through the process of automatic writing, engaging with his daily anxieties about art and life.

michaela mcKue

2011-02-16T09:23:00.002-08:00

Michaela McKue was born in Leeds in 1989. She is currently studying on the BA (Hons) Fine Art course at Nottingham Trent University. She completed the Leeds College of Art Foundation programme in 2009.

She recently exhibited in Just Hanging, Nottingham Trent University, 2010; Otherwise Discarded, Nottingham Trent University, 2010; A Line, Nottingham Trent University, 2010.

Michaela McKue is interested in how repetitive processes associated with the quotidian can be utilised in the transformation of mundane objects. The physical materials that she works with are collected from her domestic environment and contain a personal history. In Interim she will show Don’t Worry Gran They Can’t Steal Your Identity Now, in which she shreds her grandmothers papers and documents to form an intensely coloured and compact installation.

chris macinness

2011-02-16T09:23:00.001-08:00

Chris Macinnes was born in Princeton, New Jersey, USA in 1990. He is currently studying on the BA (Hons) Sculpture and Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art. He completed the Leeds College of Art Foundation programme in 2009.

He recently exhibited in Adhoc: Urban Sanctuary, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow & Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, 2010; 11/0, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, 2010; The Grand Opening, Hotel Gilchrist, Glasgow, 2010; SEA DOGS 111, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, 2010; Polarised, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, 2010.

Chris Macinnes is interested in ‘people’ or in the singular ‘person’. Recently he has begun working with animals in an allegorical manner (whereas people have the propensity to act to camera, animals do not). Animals have the capacity to reveal aspects of human nature that people often choose not to divulge. In Interim he will show his film installation Breath. The film reflects on our awareness of our own mortality through the fragility of a bird breathing. This reflection is accentuated by the ephemeral nature of the films means of projection.

LINE

2011-02-16T09:22:00.002-08:00

LINE is an art magazine founded in 2010 in Edinburgh with the express intention of giving a new generation of artists and writers a platform to voice their ideas. As much as LINE follows conventional standards of art journalism and criticism, it is also an educational conduit, inclusive to all, irrespective of an individual’s experience or reputation within the art world. In addition to the magazine, LINE also programme a series of events and exhibitions. The editor of LINE is Rachael Cloughton.

Rachael Cloughton was born in York in 1987. She is currently studying on the MA (Hons) Fine Art (Painting) course between University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art. She completed the Leeds College of Art Foundation programme in 2007. The current issue of LINE is available from Vernon Street library shop, cover price £2.

For Interim LINE will collaborate with artist Grace Harrison to stage a series of off site events at the Light, Leeds that address alternative strategies for art education. You can find out more about the Alternative Strategies events here. In addition to this series of events, a temporary library will be installed within the space filled with influential, radical texts that have also attempted to question and divert the dominant institutional discourse.They will also dedicate Issue 6 of the publication to this subject (published September 2011).

click on the image below to go to the alternative strategies site

The temporary space for Alternative strategies was made available by Art In Unusual Spaces. Click on the image below to find out more.

grace harrison

2011-02-16T09:22:00.001-08:00

Grace Harrison was born in Leeds in 1989. After a time away from structured education she studied on the BA (Hons) Fine Art course at Central St Martins between 2009 & 2010. She withdrew from this course after completing her first year in order to engage in an independently organised education that is located within art but is pursued through her participation in a wide range of activities including internships, residencies, exhibitions, free lecture programmes, seminars, discussion groups and collective activity. She completed the Leeds College of Art Foundation programme in 2008.

She recently exhibited in Short Shorts, Art in Unusual Spaces, Leeds, 2009; No Soul For Sale, Tate Modern (with Black Dogs), London, 2010; Summer Residency Show, Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, 2010.

Grace Harrison has become increasingly concerned with alternative forms of knowledge and with testing different models for living and learning. She is developing a discursive practice, her works range in medium from film and installation to performance and writing. For Interim she will collaborate with LINE magazine to stage a series of off site events at the Light, Leeds that address alternative strategies for art education. You can find out more about the Alternative Strategies events here. In addition to this series of events, a temporary library will be installed within the space filled with influential, radical texts that have also attempted to question and divert the dominant institutional discourse. She will also co-edit Issue 6 of LINE with Rachael Cloughton, (published September 2011). Harrison is also represented in Interim by her film Coke Fridge.

click on the image below to go to the alternative strategies site

The temporary space for Alternative strategies was made available by Art In Unusual Spaces. Click on the image below to find out more.

ellie davies

2011-02-16T09:21:00.002-08:00

Ellie Davies was born in London in 1990. She is currently studying on the BA (Hons) Art Practice course at Goldsmiths, University of London. She completed the Leeds College of Art Foundation programme in 2009.

She recently exhibited in Fourth Takeaway New Cross, various takeaway outlets, New Cross, London, 2011. She was also recently selected to take part in the Liam Gillick master class in London in February 2011.

Ellie Davies is drawn to compulsive and rhythmic processes and is seduced by material surfaces. From this emerges a dialogue between concepts of guilt, consumption, habit, ritual and attachment. Her artworks evolve gradually, accumulating over time. She is interested in the use of traditional craft skills and their relationship to fine art practice. In Interim she will show the video works Tunnocks Teacake and Golden Gate and the fibre work Pom Pom, a 6’ X 6’ pom pom. She is also interested in the displacement of work beyond the gallery space and will make an off site work for Interim.

alexandra culshaw

2011-02-16T09:21:00.001-08:00

Alexandra Culshaw was born in Warrington in 1989. She is currently studying on the BA (Hons) Art Practice course at Goldsmiths, University of London. She completed the Leeds College of Art Foundation programme in 2009.

She recently exhibited in Wharf Works, Goldsmiths University, London, 2010. She has been selected to take part in the Thomas Hirschhorn master class in Paris in March 2011.

Alexandra Culshaw has developed a practice, which explores the notion of collaborative exchange – the exchange of a commodity, a thought or a moment of interaction between two people. Her interests lie within the potential to mobilise, control or manipulate this exchange. In the project Visiting Artist she has worked with the residents of Henshaw Street, London SE17 to design a piece of furniture intended to replace an existing item from their living room, she then facilitates the production and making of these items. In Interim she will present the old pieces of furniture alongside photographs of the new furniture.

Rebecca Clark

2011-02-16T09:20:00.002-08:00

Rebecca Clark was born in Wakefield in 1990. She is currently studying on the BA (Hons) Fine Art (Sculpture) course at Wimbledon College of Art. She completed the Leeds College of Art Foundation programme in 2009.

She has recently exhibited in Fumble, Wimbledon College of Art, London, 2010 and Luxury, Wimbledon College of Art, London, 2010.

Rebecca Clark uses observations on conventional western culture as an arena to explore the notion of fame and transience and the continuous simulation of popular imagery. Her recent work denotes the underlying theme of kitsch, where art can become pleasingly sentimental, whilst examining the subconscious presence of consumerism within everyday life. In Interim she will show Test Card F, a 15 minute video in which she adopts the identity of the young girl playing noughts and crosses with her doll Bubbles the Clown, frequently broadcast during downtime on the BBC.

simon bramley

2011-02-16T09:20:00.001-08:00

Simon Bramley was born in Leeds in 1990. He is currently studying on the BA (Hons) Fine Art course at Chelsea College of Art & Design. He completed the Leeds College of Art Foundation programme in 2009.

He has recently exhibited in Mugsabition, Opt-In Space, Chelsea College of Art, London, 2010; Cheese, Wine & SALT, Opt-In Space, Chelsea College of Art, London, 2010; An Alternative Space, Chelsea College of Art, London, 2010 and Adorno’s Porno, ICA, London, 2010. He is a member of the artist’s collectives SALT and Adorno’s Porno.

Simon Bramley’s practice is concerned with the employment and dissemination of alternative means, forms and platforms of non-hierarchical distribution. His work often has no end point but is continually revisited, reworked and reframed. In Interim he will show I Need Air a photograph of a sign carried through the streets of London and NEWSPAPERS WON’T DECIDE THIS ELECTION a framed found object. He will also make a new work for Interim.

georgina bolton

2011-02-16T09:18:00.000-08:00

Georgina Bolton was born in Harrogate in 1987. She is currently studying on the MA (Hons) Fine Art (Sculpture) course between University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art. She completed the Leeds College of Art Foundation programme in 2007.

She has recently exhibited in Secret Garden Party, Huntingdon, 2010; Hidden Door Festival, Roxy Art House, Edinburgh, 2010 and Poise, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, 2010. She has been selected for a residency at the John David Mooney Foundation, Chicago in July 2011.

Georgina Bolton’s work is concerned with a diverse investigation into what constitutes ‘dimensionality’. She is interested in the finished and unfinished, the solid and void, the tangible and intangible, the functional and the dysfunctional. This is often communicated through an architectural, geometrically orientated aesthetic and an imaginative approach to ‘shape’ and ‘structure’. Whilst on a recent exchange programme to Budapest she developed an obsession with wrapping old coat stands in brightly coloured wool, aesthetically altering these functional objects. In Interim she will show Poise a sculpture consisting of linked forms also wrapped in coloured wool, dispersed throughout the space. Her work encourages an acute awareness of the physical architecture.

INTERIM 2011

2011-02-16T09:15:00.001-08:00

ex 2010 exhibition details

2010-08-31T04:40:00.000-07:00

16 september 2010 to 8 october 2010
9am to 4pm
Weekdays only.

ex 2010 artists

2010-08-31T03:54:00.000-07:00

alice brook
ruth campbell
tom cookson
lucy crouch & katherine payne
eleanor hutchinson
timothy pulleyn
eleanor purseglove
aaron sands
rachel westerman
josh whitaker

ex 2010 introduction by sean kaye

2010-08-31T03:40:00.000-07:00

ex is an annual exhibition profiling a selection of artists at the beginning of their careers. It is selected from the degree shows of fine art graduates who have formerly completed their foundation course at Leeds College of Art. The exhibition was selected by Sean Kaye, Mick Welbourn and Jenny West after visiting fourteen fine art BA shows during May and June 2010.

Chris Newlove Horton has been invited to write this year’s catalogue essay. Chris is an artist and writer based in London. He graduated from the fine art programme at Central St Martins College of Art and Design in 2009, and was a Leeds foundation student in 2005/06. His work was included in ex 2009. He is currently writing a thriller about the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his 1957 Plan For Greater Baghdad, a series of buildings he proposed for the Iraqi capital. He is a member of the arts group S P A C E C R A F T, who are curating the END OF THE WORLD PARTY at Concrete, London in September 2010. A book containing essays, fiction, images and works will be published after the event.
www.chrisnewlovehorton.blogspot.com
www.spacecraftprogram.co.uk
Sean Kaye 2010

JOSH WHITAKER

2010-08-31T03:36:00.000-07:00

Josh Whitaker was born in Leeds in 1987. He studied at Leeds College of Art between 2006 and 2006, then at Wimbledon College of Art from 2007 to 2010.

He has recently been included in: Mill24, Islington Mill Academy, Manchester; No Soul For Sale (with Black Dogs), Tate Modern, London; OpenForum, Matt Roberts Gallery, London; The Middle of Nowhere: Objects and Actions in the Abyss, Departure Gallery, London; Bricks, Area 10, Peckham, London; Black Dogs DIY Survival Kit (at the Leeds Summat), Leeds University Union, Leeds; Barterama, Barbican Conservatory, London; Group Show, JWT Offices, London; Interim (as The Free Studio with Callum Crawford), Leeds College of Art, Leeds; Self Titled (with Roland Ross), The Bob and Roberta Smith Show on Resonance FM; Triangel, Triangel, Bentlage, Germany, exhibition and weeklong residency with artists from London and Poznan, Poland.

He co-edited The One Staple Magazine with Amy Brooks. The publication was launched at Matt Roberts Gallery, London. He worked with Amy Brooks, Callum Crawford, and Roland in the production of Lucky Pages, published by Lucky PDF Gallery. His essay Bob Marley and Sol LeWitt - On Mysticism and the Possibility for an Artwork, is stored at the British Library.

He launched and taught at The Free Studio Pedagogical Exercise at St Martins College of Art, April to July 2010.

useful work vs. useless toil (banner for the outside of an institution) black acrylic on found fabrics 2010

Asterix vs Asterisk - wall drawing in black acrylic - 2010

RACHEL WESTERMAN

2010-08-31T03:35:00.001-07:00

Rachel Westerman was born in Doncaster in 1988. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2006 and 2007, and then at Chelsea College of Art and Design from 2007 to 2010.

She has recently been included in: Condensation, Hanbury Hall, London; One Days Work, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London; Through, The Rag Factory, London; There, Untitled BCN Gallery, Barcelona; ADD/REMOVE, Triangle Space, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London; CUPBOARD, Brockley, London.

a table is a table is a table - MDF, Stainless Steel - 2010

Replacement (light switch) - Porcelain - 2010

Replacement (light switch) - Porcelain - 2010

AARON SANDS

2010-08-31T03:30:00.000-07:00

Aaron Sands was born in Bradford in 1988. He studied at Leeds College of Art between 2006 and 2007, and then Glasgow School of Art from 2007 to 2010.

He recently showed in: Joe Higgs meets a Tortoise, Big Screen, The Vic, Glasgow; Violated, Assembly Gallery, Glasgow; Interim, Leeds College of Art, Leeds; Tensile Strength, The Garage, Glasgow; The Big Drawing Show, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Breton Brut, Dundasvale Housing Project, Glasgow.

He reviewed the exhibition A Message to the People on Impending Doom, a group show at The Duchy Gallery Glasgow in February 2010. The review is available at www.artartartgallery.com. He also wrote the text Into the Hills with Socrates and a Penguin which featured in Mammogram Magazine, and Breton Brutes in collaboration with Omercan Cirit.
www.arronsands.co.uk

Slug v Salt - Pencil & ink on newsprint in Ikea Frames - 2009

The Tortoise is on its Back (detail) - Digital Film - 2010

ELEANOR PURSEGLOVE

2010-08-31T03:28:00.002-07:00

Eleanor Purseglove was born in Birmingham in 1987. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006, and then at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design from 2007 to 2010.

She recently showed in: Twenty+some, The Rag Factory, London; Art Schmart, Swanfield Yard, London; Rank/Outsiders, Camberwell Arts Bar, London.

Hotel (Windows) - Oil on canvas - 2010

Swimmers (detail) - oil on canvas - 2010

Swimmers - oil on canvas - 2010

TIMOTHY PULLEYN

2010-08-31T03:28:00.001-07:00

Timothy Pulleyn was born in Huddersfield in 1987. He studied at Leeds College of Art between 2006 and 2007, and then at Glasgow School of Art from 2007 to 2010.

He recently showed in: Glasgow Fleeto, Shoreditch Town Hall, London; A working way forward, Glasgow School or Art Barnes Building, Glasgow; One step forward, Glasgow School of Art Barnes Building; The fish that never swam, Glasgow School of Art Barnes Building, Glasgow; Parallels, Grace and Clark Fyfe Gallery, Glasgow; Eyebrow Says Relax, Glasgow School of Art Barnes Building, Glasgow.
Upcoming exhibitions include: RSA New Contemporaries 2010, The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (dates to be confirmed).

Pulleyn was awarded the Hutchinson Fine Art Prize in 2010.

Unit 6 - 43m - Wood, screws, power drill and string - 2010

Unit 6 - 43m (D) - Wood, screws, power drill and string - 2010

Unit 6 - 43m (C) - Wood, screws, power drill and string - 2010

ELEANOR HUTCHINSON

2010-08-31T03:26:00.000-07:00

Eleanor Hutchinson was born in Leeds in 1987. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2006 and 2007, and then at Chelsea College of Art and Design from 2007 to 2010.

She recently showed in: Bricks, Area 10, Peckham, London; Bricks, Shoreditch Town Hall, London.

Back-to-back chair for two people - Ash wood, steel and fabric - 2010

Back-to-back chair for two people - Ash wood, steel and fabric - 2010

Back-to-back chair for two people - Ash wood, steel and fabric - 2010

LUCY CROUCH AND KATHERINE PAYNE

2010-08-31T03:15:00.000-07:00

Lucy Crouch and Katherine Payne have been working collaboratively since early 2009.

They recently showed in: Monumental Masons, 17 Osborne Street, London; Château D’if, Shoreditch Town Hall, London; Xhibit, The Gallery, London College of Communication, London.

Lucy Crouch was born in Wakefield in 1987. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2006 and 2007, and then at Chelsea College of Art and Design from 2007 to 2010.

She recently showed in: One Days Work, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London; Interim, Leeds College of Art, Leeds.

Katherine Payne was born in Manchester in 1987. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2006 and 2007, and then at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design from 2007 to 2010.

She showed in: Rank/Outsiders, Camberwell Arts Bar, London.

http://remembertoremember.wordpress.com/

http://www.lucycrouch.com/

http://katherinepayne.wordpress.com/

It Is Always Now Somewhere - Digital Films - 2010

It Is Always Now Somewhere - Two Channel Video - 2010

TOM COOKSON

2010-08-31T03:11:00.002-07:00

Tom Cookson was born in Huddersfield in 1987. He studied on the Foundation and then the BA course at Leeds College of Art and Design, between 2006 and 2010.

He recently showed in: Free Range 2010, Brick Lane, London; Art In Unusual Spaces, Leeds Shopping Plaza, Leeds; Archipelago, Harrogate International Centre, Harrogate; Digital Dream Trail, The Culture Company, Leeds; Expo, Leeds City Gallery, Victoria Gardens, Leeds; Kendal Calling, Lowther Deer Park, Cumbria; Wonderwood, Holbeck Urban Village, Leeds; dNA, St James’ Hospital/LCA, Leeds; Interim, Leeds College of Art and Design, Leeds; Klanging Banging, Holbeck, Leeds; Industrial Sabotage, Armley Mills, Leeds; Northern Art Show, Harrogate International Centre, Harrogate.

Upcoming exhibitions include: God is in the Details, Primo Alonso, London (28th October to 5th December 2010); Pointless Endeavours, 2 Beechwood Avenue, Norwich (March 2010).

He received the Neville Street Bursary Prize in 2008.

Staple Practice - Sterling Silver - 2010

Reclining Alchemist - 9ct Gold - 2010

RUTH CAMPBELL

2010-08-31T03:11:00.001-07:00

Ruth Campbell was born in Peterborough in 1987. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2006 and 2007, and then at Central St. Martins College of Art from 2007 to 2010.
She recently showed in: The Annual White Box Festival 2009, Central St. Martins College of Art, London.

Upcoming exhibitions include: Thirst: water is art, art is water, Real World Gallery, London;

Filthy water can’t be washed - Inkjet on photo rag - 2010

Filthy water can’t be washed - Inkjet on photo rag - 2010

ALICE BROOK

2010-08-31T03:04:00.000-07:00

Alice Brook was born in Huddersfield in 1980. She studied at Leeds College of Art between 2006 and 2007, and then at Glasgow School of Art from 2007 to 2010.

She recently showed in: Glasgow Fleeto, Shoreditch Town Hall, London. Another Place, White Space, Glasgow; Hinterland, The White House Gallery, Glasgow; Not The Angler’s Rendezvous, The Barnes Building, Glasgow; A Working Way Forward, The Garage, Glasgow;The Library of Alice Ann Brook, White Space, Glasgow.

Once, round Cumbrae - interlaced video still, High Definition video - 2010

Passengering - Projected High Definition video installation - 2010

Passengering - Projected High Definition video installation - 2010

ex 2010 essay by Chris Newlove Horton

2010-08-31T02:37:00.000-07:00

EX as CROSS as X as TIMES

A turtle on its back, legs wagging in the air. Trapped by nature and further trapped by technology, the turtle lives upside down in a world of slow-motion. I’m never sure where to begin, but slowly is a start.
This is the first time all of these works have been seen together. Most were made with the intention of being seen in some kind of isolation. Or at least they were created in some kind of isolation and without thought to any of the specific works they are now accompanied by. None were made for this show in particular, though their presentation may have been adapted. ex is an exhibition without a linear conceptual programme. This essay, therefore, must follow such a lead, winding with the turns so as to ride the thing out. I have clumsily divided the works into three vague sections: SURFACE, INTERIOR, and, most clumsily vague of all, ETHER. There are no claims to truth here, nothing is properly correct. I aim only to nab a needle from the patchwork and thread a narrative through the exhibition as a whole.

SURFACE
The turtle video, The Tortoise is on its Back, is by Arron Sands. And depending on your constitution, it is either funny, sad, agonising, or annoying. The point, I think, is to try generate all four, leaving the viewer dazed, perplexed and perhaps even angry. As he says on his website, “What is going on here? My practice is one of plastic ideology . . . The drawings, sculptures, videos, poems etc. hold a straightforwardly backwards mirror to the world, proclaiming ‘What the fuck’ in an attempt to situate myself among the domestic abominations that taunt me . . . Through dysfunctional family ensembles of intentionally confrontational one-liners, I hope to create work that creates an abiding sentiment, be it a sore head in the morning, a physical revolt on my person or a dialogue through which sub rosa can be excavated. “ If you couldn’t already tell, Sands writes also, and with wild temperament too. His Bad Poetry reads like a dissected dictionary. I hear the acid victim photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, emphatically played by the late Dennis Hopper. I hear Roberto Benigni caffeined to the extreme (as if he needed it) in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes. Puddle Fuck recalls a blasé Kerouac, or a drug-addled Dr. Seuss (as if he needed it.) Weihnachten Baum (Christmas Tree) is Dan Graham’s Scheme reimagined in viral form; systematic, but apparently nonsensical, thoroughness driven by whimsy. The words fall from elsewhere, a multitude of voices proliferate. The text feels snatched and stolen, then resold on the cheap.
Josh Whitaker’s Useful Work vs. Useless Toil (Banner For The Outside Of An Institution) takes its title and immediate message from the 19th Century socialist William Morris. Morris used the phrase in a speech to some London workers, and then again, later, as the title of an essay. It sits somewhat uncomfortably within an art context. ‘Useful’ is an obsolete word in art. Usefulness is never questioned, never expected or anticipated. As a condition it is irrelevant. But ‘Useless Toil’ fits the other hand like a glove. In The Unknown Masterpiece Balzac has the lead character Frenhofer - a painter, the greatest of his time, now old and seemingly of little output - toil for ten years in the production of a single portrait. When the portrait is revealed to his young protégées, they recoil at seeing “nothing but colours piled one upon another in confusion, and held in restraint by a multitude of curious lines which form a wall of a painting.” They presume his madness and taunt him, laughing as they leave while he weeps and threatens them. The morning after, feeling somewhat anxious, they return to Frenhofer’s studio only to find he has “died during the night after burning his pictures.” Picasso claimed to have been haunted by Frenhofer’s fate, and in order to wrestle that particular demon, moved his own studio to the same Paris street where much of the story takes place. More recently, on the BBC’s The Culture Show, Martin Creed joyously declared his entire practice as a “collection of failures”. In da Vinci’s words, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” Morris was himself an artist, a craftsman working with textiles and also a painter and poet. Where he saw art in “Useful Work” remains unclear, though he lists “works of art - the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful” amongst things “which serve the pleasures of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted”, things which he sees as important and good. But those words and sentiments have long since drifted into obscurity. Much contemporary art rejoices in corruption. And beauty is as redundant a concept as usefulness. Whitaker is more than aware of this redundancy, stating his interest in “what could be viewed as failed or historicised ideologies.” The key gesture of the work is its banner form, the disguise which reinserts the Morris phrase into modern life via, in Whitaker’s words, “ the aesthetics of the Situationists in Paris 1968 and industrial action of the 1970s and 80s” and even, I should say, of today. He continues, “The piece is intended to go on the outside of buildings where people meet . . . galleries, schools etc.” and he even specifies as much in the title of the work. Attached to an “institution”, the ambiguity of the phrase remains, but the subjects it is ambiguous toward have shifted. Who decides for us what is useful and what is not? And who decides on who decides? Whitaker seizes on these conjectures and sends them out to do battle in public space; to battle, in fact, over public space.
Eleanor Hutchinson’s sculptures also confront the public through a stance of disguise; though here the veil is slipping and the terrain, at first, appears more familiar. Initially, Back-to-back chair for two people looks like two separate chairs welded together, but Hutchinson designed the work herself and used a variety of technical methods in its construction. As she explains, “Lengths of ash wood were steam bended to create the armrests. The frame was made by cutting, bending and welding metal piping to the shape I wanted. It was then sanded, polished, cleaned and sprayed with a clear varnish. The seats are a wooden base, foam, and then material, cut and sewn into the right shape and stretched over each base.” This thoroughness in regards to material and design are what make Back-to-back... such an intriguing sight. It looks legitimate, like a design prototype or a showroom model. And it looks fun too, like a party game or perverted speed-dating prop; and with two people sat upon it, like a feat of domestic engineering, spurning gravity, social convention, and easy artistic classification. “The planning and execution of my work draws on methods used in design, yet it firmly remains as a dialogue with it,” she asserts. “I feel the ‘designed’ appearance of some of my work can give the viewer a route into it, yet its form and context as artwork stops it directly mimicking everyday products.” The gallery environment is essential then, in defining this object as art. “I made it as a piece of art, not a piece of design, and want it to be seen in that context, yet I’m also aware that it will be seen as other things as well. “ In that context, as art, Back-to-back... continues interventionist lines of inquiry, with interest on anthropological, rather than outright political, issues. “I am interested in how the arrangement and manipulation of different components within space can influence behaviour . . . The encounter between the two people that sit on it is crucial. Their forced physical contact and the exclusion of eye contact is an important part of the work.” For Hutchinson the mutation of design results in the mutation of experience. The mutation is what signifies the art, and only art could offer such a beast sweet asylum.
All the works in Rachel Westerman’s Replacement series, as well as a table is a table is a table, are too in search of such asylum, but outside of art, out in the everyday. Westerman’s sculptures are created to be identical in appearance to pre-existing objects; they are clones rather than mutants. Disguised as such, she intends her works to, in her words, “induce in the viewer a reflexive moment of realisation and, ultimately, reconsideration . . . to alter the viewer’s perception of the object in question.” This is most successfully achieved in a table is a table is a table, where Westerman matches not only the dimensions and materials of an apparently average table, but also the marks of misuse and decay, which are local to just one table in particular. “What makes this table a table?” she writes on her website, “Is it the method of production that is undertaken in the name of art and its label as a sculpture of a table as opposed to a real table? Or is it merely its ability to carry out the same functions as a ‘real’ table, which it is undoubtedly able to do.” We are almost one hundred years post-Duchamp and his first readymade. So it is almost without question that the original table, the table on which Westerman’s sculptural table is based, could, through various processes of acquisition and redeployment, attain some kind of art status. What Westerman wants to know is, can this transformation go in the other direction, can an art object ever be emptied of whatever makes it art, and exist only as the object it most resembles? This operation does happen, and it happens remarkably often. Think of the paintings found in secondhand shops around the country, few of these could or would be classified as art, despite their resemblance to it. These objects have lost their art status over time; although some, it must be said, have always been without it. Now, leant against the wall or piled high amongst bric-a-brac, they seem so removed from what we think art is, what art should be, that they are transformed back into paintings as paintings only: “A picture or design executed with paint” as the dictionary has it. Westerman explains that “the work is predominantly site specific and I choose to replicate and repeat objects within a given space . . . [then place the objects] back within the original environment.” This method of creation and deployment - unfortunately unrealisable for ex - allows her cloned objects to become indeterminable from their authentic predecessors, providing an easier route for her works as they seek to defect from their art state.
“I’m interested in the value of materials and how they can bestow value onto the worthless, or lose their value if they are disguised as something worthless.” Not Westerman’s words, but those of Tom Cookson. Cookson sculpts, what he terms, “throwaway objects” out of traditionally high-value materials, like gold or silver. These are often then positioned in a space to resemble the debris they descend from. So a sterling silver staple is forced into a wall - as in Staple Practice - and a 9ct gold match is left casually askew upon a plinth - as in Reclining Alchemist. Cookson sees the latter work anthropomorphically, “as a portrait of an alchemist burnt out in the pursuit of gold.” The gold match, denied its function as a match, brought to life already in a state of death, is a memorial to that human pursuit and endeavour, where science could lead to riches, but came with a potentially high price. Cookson’s minute monument burns only in the mind, and therefore forever. Cookson continues, “Giving value to a throwaway object questions why we put value on materials at all, especially when they have no function . . . Also, by carving away at the gold and silver, it is diminishing their weight and therefore their material worth. Yet,” and here the paradox is laid bare, “another value is being invested through making.” Cookson attempts to question which value is the most important, the most true, if such a thing can be said - Use value? Material value? Labour? History? - reigniting the disorientation at the heart of much political thought.

INTERIOR
“An unfocused gaze takes in a passing landscape, unfolding in a slow impression of land, sea and sky. Greys and blues are punctuated by intense, jewel like, kaleidoscopic greens and yellows. A low drone accompanies these images, placing the viewer within the private space of the car.” That description, by Alice Brook, of her own work, passengering, is as good as any I would want to write. Brook’s notion of ‘passengering’ has come from her reading of Feminist writers such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. As she says, “A passenger is submissive and has little or no control over their own destiny, which appeared to resonate with the perceptions of women that Irigaray and Cixous were keen to counter.” Indeed, the viewer, who sees with eyes from behind the camera, has no control over their destiny and is forced through the images that appear on screen; beautiful images, “kaleidoscopic” the ideal word. But the engine drone creates menace, as most drones do. It recalls the work of Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch’s go-to composer. Badalamenti has become known for his use of harmonic suspension, whereby a series of unfinished cadences are used to create musical tension, the listener left searching for resolution. In passengering, the drone is both expectant and claustrophobic, a reminder that one is being driven, that the destination is another’s will. As viewers we must adhere to someone else’s idea of freedom, follow their desires, with the lights and colours out of reach, though only a mere window’s width away. We long for freedom but also enjoy the ride, aware of the pressures that come with being a driver. Often in fiction, the pressure of freedom leads to oblivion. Or perhaps freedom, the freedom to drive, to pursue one’s desires, arrives only when “destiny” has become pure oblivion. Through coercion and perversion, the lead in David Peace’s novel 1974, Eddie Dunford, is led into a torrid and terrible conspiracy. When all is lost and almost everyone is dead, Dunford is finally in the driving seat, the police not far behind. The book ends with the single line, “Ninety miles an hour.” Going back to David Lynch, the film Lost Highway sees Bill Pullman as a passenger in his own life. Constantly submitting to the needs of others, his fears consume him, driving him into darkness. He kills his own wife and is then put on death row. Only after killing the darkness inside him can he sit in the driver’s seat. Only when death can be his sole destination, his sole destiny, is he allowed to take the wheel and tear out into the night. The fate of the passenger in Brook’s video may not be so grand, or so undeniably male, it remains in the unknown. Watching the water droplets on the window makes me think of fresh falling rains, cleansing waters straight from the skies.
From there to here. And as Ruth Campbell’s wonderfully Gothic title tells us, Filthy water can’t be washed. “I wanted to highlight qualities such as flatness of plane, flatness of colour, the geometric layout of objects, and scale,” she says about her photographs. Taken with a medium format camera, edited, and then printed onto high grain matte paper, the resulting images, of the London Regent’s Canal, are painterly and rich. The water seems to stretch out much further than it should, more like a celestial sky than the muddied inland waterway that stretches across North London. The colours swill and change, the water seems alive. The occasional floating debris brings one back down, makes one aware of the water’s surface, aware that there is a top, and, therefore, a below. For the artist too, the water is almost alive, “Our society throws and dumps anything into the waters, and assumes our rubbish, troubles, and sins, will disappear or wash away. However the water will retain these stories forever.” Campbell reimagines these public waterways as a holding place for shared memories, a landfill for bad thoughts and unwanted dreams. The water holds them in abstract and replays them as a projection onto its surface. To return to David Lynch for the last time, and again to Lost Highway, the writer Greil Marcus has said that, “The key to Lost Highway is not to look beneath its surface for any kind of secret, but to find its surface, which is almost impossible to do.” A photograph can grab at a surface, seeming to provide everything that we need. Then the more one looks, the surface going in and out of focus, disappearing then reappearing in perpetual tide, the less familiar it all begins to seem.
“The advertising images of hotels and resorts that we see in holiday brochures propagate an aesthetically heightened image of the ideal leisure time experience. The space that the hotel inhabits in cinema, however, more often than not projects a less innocent side to the fantasy of release in escape. It is the scene of the crime; of sex and drugs and death,” writes Eleanor Purseglove. Purseglove’s Hotel paintings - (Hotel) At the Door, (Hotel) Windows and Swimmers - are doused in cinematic deja-vu. They evoke memories that feel close but are never quite within reach, scenes from films that might never have actually been made. They match the images inside one’s head - the ones lacking full form, lacking a geography or a history - the images that flicker, agitate, and ultimately haunt; not because they are now dead, but because they were never alive to begin with. “Film is death, because it is a shadow, and a mock version-of the truth of light,” as one character says in Richard Foreman’s 1987 play Film is Evil: Radio is Good. Shadows play tricks with the eye, presenting shapes that morph and move and become other things and of other times. And intense light can play much the same tricks. Purseglove’s starched-Earth policy with Swimmers has left tangible reality beyond repair. It is, in the artist’s term, “aesthetically heightened” to the point where Foreman’s “a mock version-of the truth of light” has been literalised, smothering the canvas in a realness of paint and presence that does not allow the scene to form with any fullness. The landscape depicted in Swimmers is a dead weight dipped into the ether, then tossed into the sun to burn.

ETHER
Lucy Crouch and Katherine Payne grab that sun and let it burn and burn and burn. It Is Always Now, Somewhere sees them stretch, as they call it, “a period of becoming” until becoming is all that is there. To see the work as a whole one must stand back and between and for hours, letting the work happen around us. The sun sets and rises perpetually, but imperceptibly, in front of our eyes; time’s arrow having been harnessed and slowed through technology. “We are interested in marking moments in space and time, with a wish to embody distance and duration,” say Crouch and Payne. “Through simple gestures we look to explore the potential of the in-between moment, to exist within and make visible this liminal interface . . . We utilize film, photography and other means, to deal with such distance and proximity.” In his book The Eyes of the Skin, architect and writer Juhani Pallasma states, “Architecture is our primary tool in relating us with space and time . . . It domesticates limitless space and endless time to be tolerated, inhabited and understood by humankind.” Film and video, I would say, can do much the same. Crouch and Payne have physicalised time’s awesome circulatory movement by presenting a video that is simultaneously of somewhere, a particular place - look at that boat in the distance! - and of everywhere also. It flits from local to national to international and then cosmic. One goes up, the other comes down, the movement repeated so as to never remain still. The action is similar to the Graham Gussin video Beginning and Ending at the Same Time (Horizontal Movie). But where the push and pull of that work relates to the act of looking and the reflexes which accompany it, It Is Always Now, Somewhere lingers on a more conceptual plane, exploring the passage of time as an idea over an event.
Timothy Pulleyn performs momentary events that are discarded and thrown out into time; as in Unit 12 - 43m. He gathers his material, short wooden beams of various size, all painted red, into a self-made hod, and then walks from his studio to a predetermined location, with the hod on his back. Upon arrival, he uses the wood to make a sculptural form, which again, was predetermined prior to the event. After a time, the work is then removed. As he says, “The work only exists for the one or two hours I set myself as a limit. Once the two hours are up the wood is put back in the hod and taken back to my studio.” He continues, “I am interested in the strict, the continuous, and the improvised developments of rhythm. My work derives from music in its simplest and most primitive form.” Visually, the sculptures are true to this musical interest. The wooden beams are often set in repetitive linear patterns, denoting forms of time and measure, rhythm and beat. The process of the making mirrors that of a musical performance also: take your equipment to the venue, set-up, perform, and then leave. All that physically remains of Pulleyn’s sculptures are photographs, which are typically posted on his blog, like a travelogue or diary. But the work really exists in the mind of those few who, by chance, saw him strolling through the city - Glasgow usually, but now Leeds for the first time - hod on back, red wood protruding. Those people were ‘there’, as audience and as witnesses of the work. The sculptures allow Pulleyn the means to perform, but it is the performance, the activity, that lies at the heart of his practice.
When asked by Willoughby Sharp, “What is your art for?” the American artist Bruce Nauman replied simply, “To keep me busy.” That has been, and always will be, plenty reason enough.

Chris Newlove Horton, August 2010.

Chris Newlove Horton is an artist and writer based in London. He is currently writing a thriller about Frank Lloyd Wright and his 1957 Plan For Greater Baghdad, a series of buildings the American architect proposed for the Iraqi capital.
He is a member of the art group S P A C E C R A F T, who are curating the END OF THE WORLD PARTY at Concrete, London, in September 2010. A book containing essays, fiction, images, and works, will be published after the event.

www.chrisnewlovehorton.blogspot.com

www.spacecraftprogram.co.uk

interim 2010 artists

2010-02-11T08:00:00.001-08:00

Barr + Dowler
Emma Connor
Dear + Harris + Ilett
Megan Hoyle
Catherine Jones
Anna Rhodes
Rachel Wilson

Thursday 11th March to Friday 26th March
9am - 4pm (weekdays only)
leeds college of art
vernon street
leeds
ls2 8ph
0113 202 8106

interim 2010 introduction by Jon Wood

2010-02-11T07:42:00.000-08:00

Now then

Interim is a competition that invites 2nd year BA students who did their foundation course at Leeds College of Art to submit work for exhibition at their former college. It gives students a chance to make new work in a competitive situation, but within a familiar and supportive environment. As well as an invitation to exhibit work, it is inevitably, also, an invitation to think about the idea of returning (some have called it a ‘homecoming’) and an opportunity as much to re-envisage the recent past, as it is to try and show what the future might hold.

This is the third year that Interim has been running and what was striking for me this year was to see how a number of the proposals addressed this ‘past present’ dynamic, treating it almost as a subject in its own right. In keeping with this, many used repetition and fragmentation to create works that lead complex and ambiguous temporal lives. The fact that this is the first group of BA students who would have seen an Interim show whilst students at Leeds might have played a part in all this. They have already been the primary audience for the first ‘Interim’ in spring 2008 and experienced firsthand what this exhibition might mean for students at the college.

The work of seven artists is being shown. The proposals spanned media, with sculpture, painting, photography, film and sound deployed in ways that, though all visually different, intimated concerns which chimed with one another. Emma Connor (Slade) and the collaborative partnership Abigail Barr and Emily Victoria Dowler (Edinburgh) have made vocal sound pieces which unsettle our confidence in words and our reliance on them to stand for the things we know, remember and hold dear. Barr and Dowler take the children’s word association game and accelerates such associative thinking in a way that even the nimblest minded adult would find it difficult to maintain. This repetitive word sound becomes a kind of automaton-like, metronomic muzak: a soundtrack to walk up and down the stairs to. Around the corner on the ground floor you’ll encounter Connor’s roll call of her old student colleagues. The names have been distorted, suggesting that what they might stand for and her accompanying memories of them are changing with time.

Repetition also plays a crucial role in the painting of Megan Hoyle (Bath Spa) and Anna Rhodes (Glasgow). Rhodes’ hourly oil paintings capture (across 24 hours) momentary frames from an ever-changing skyscape, collapsing close-up with distance and giving a personal, almost diaristic quality to the overlooked movements that float past above. Hoyle works in series too, drawing our attention to the gradual build up of medium slowly dripped down lengths of canvas thread. Time and routine is demonstrated by these stalactite-like, sculpture-painting accumulations and like Rhodes, Hoyle captures things slowed down, encouraging us to do the same.

Catherine Jones (Goldsmiths) and the collaborative trio compromising Romany Dear, Ashanti Harris and Emily Ilett (Glasgow) have all deployed film in ways which draw our attention to compelling power of repetitive action to challenge our understanding of the meanings of basic human gestures and the lives lead by the objects that surround us. The latter have choreographed enigmatic movements through a forest, building on the striking blend of stasis and animation in Harris and Ilett’s earlier impressive Knocking on Wood. The theatrical staging of things is also employed indoors by Jones, who has set up an ensemble of monitors on plinths to help interrupt our will to subsume objects within familiar narratives. She uses film to create brief, mysterious moments for things, giving them strange, prop-like roles within episodes in unknown stories. Finally, the fragmentary account we get of things resurfaces in the montage strategies discernable in the work of Rachel Wilson. Wilson’s collages bespeak a curiously blunt and deadpan engagement with images widely circulating in magazines and on the net, suggesting that subtle forms of interconnectivity can emerge from these sometimes repeated and often brutal combinations of displaced and de-contextualised images.

Jon Wood
Henry Moore Institute

Rachel Wilson

2010-02-11T07:41:00.003-08:00

Rachel Wilson was born in Huddersfield 1989. She is currently studying on the BA (Hons) Art Practice course at Goldsmiths, University of London.

She has recently exhibited in re-construct, BPB Building, Goldsmiths, London, 2009;

Rachel Wilson is concerned with the development of work, which through the presentation of displaced fragments of information offers an altered understanding or interpretation of facts and visual truths.

She appropriates images through photographing printed matter such as books, magazines and family photographs and extracts images from television and computer screens to produce mixed media work. By drawing attention to a local or partial aspect of a whole through dislocation, her work aims to produce a reflective and emotionless or deadpan response in the viewer.

Anna Rhodes

2010-02-11T07:41:00.001-08:00

Anna Rhodes was born in Huddersfield 1989. She is currently studying on the BA (Hons) Painting and Printmaking course at Glasgow School of Art.

She is presently on an exchange programme at Alberta College of Art and Design, Canada.

Anna Rhodes forges connections between diverse geographical places through the accumulation of systematic and timed observations; a sense of continuity and uniformity is sought in the work she develops through processes of subtraction, alteration and magnification.

Interested in the means by which vast areas and expanses of sky and land might be isolated and framed, she has constructed and appropriated devices such as periscopes and lenses to separate out and encase a view. The information derived from this method of selection is reinterpreted to form the basis of a series of referential yet ambiguous paintings.

Catherine Jones

2010-02-11T07:40:00.001-08:00

Catherine Jones was born in Barnsley 1988. She is currently studying on the BA (Hons) Art Practice course at Goldsmiths, University of London.

She has recently exhibited in re-construct, BPB Building, Goldsmiths, London 2009; she will take part in a residency held in conjunction with the Billy Childish exhibition Unknowable but Certain, ICA Gallery, London, April, 2010.

The central theme of Catherine Jones’s work is an exploration of the relationship between the real and the imagined world. She is interested in the layering and interlacing of material substances and information, with genuine and invented memories. In recent work she has playfully pieced together fragments of opposing information to create new associations and dimensions. Her work utilises and combines writing, photography, video and drawing.

Referencing the contrived and staged magic of theatre and cinema, the video installation Dolly displaces time and object. Inanimate and redundant props act as characters within a type of vertical narrative. Playing with a poetic realism, the work deals with a fragmented narrative that the viewer attempts to placate.

Megan Hoyle

2010-02-11T07:39:00.002-08:00

Megan Hoyle was born in Wakefield 1989. She is currently studying painting on the BA(Hons) Fine Art course at Bath Spa University.

She has exhibited in Breakfast Club, Project Space, Dartmouth Avenue, Bath, in 2009 and 2010.

Megan Hoyle makes work in a number of different ways, all of which are gradually evolving.
She uses the language of painting; separating out and taking apart its physical and material elements, which she then, quite literally reconfigures in three-dimensional space. Her installation works are created through a process of addition and accretion.

She is compelled by the behaviour of materials and their potential for change and transformation. Exploring how the threads, once stripped from a canvas may inhabit space, or might hang, drape or stretch, she examines the momentum, reaction and performance of fluid mediums such as paint and varnish as they, flow, drip, spread and dry out.

Her site-specific work invites and leads the viewer into the physical space of the work provoking a sensory and spatial encounter.

Dear + Harris + Ilett

2010-02-11T07:39:00.001-08:00

Romany Dear was born in Ormskirk in 1989; Ashanti Harris was born in Guyana in 1989; Emily Ilett was born in Harrogate in 1989. They are all currently studying on the BA(Hons) Sculpture and Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art.

Recent exhibitions include: Raw Meat: Cut the Chiffon, Clark and Fyfe Gallery, Glasgow, November, 2009. The Drawing Show, Barnes Building, Glasgow, December, 2009. ARS HAMS: Under Construction, Riihimaki, Finland, September, 2009. Library of Radient Optimism, Barnes Building, Glasgow, May, 2009.
Forthcoming exhibitions include: Public Art Project, Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, March, 2010. Gallerie Fisk, Bergen, April 2010. New Sculpture, Newberry Tower, Glasgow, 2010.

Much of Romany Dear’s work explores movement derived through her interaction with people. Her work takes the form of choreographed events developed from words and instructions contained within transcribed interview texts.

Ashanti Harris develops choreographed video works that employ remote control. From the movement of the camera to the movement of the human body and everyday objects she concentrates on the mechanical as the central element within her work.

An exploration of emptiness acts as the foundation of Emily Ilett’s practice. She seeks to reinvent or search for what has been lost or more importantly what is revealed by absence. Her work explores the poetic and the lyrical encompassing performance, writing, sculpture and drawing.

The collaboration between Dear, Harris and Ilett has been informed by the concerns and working methods of their individual practices. In the work Sequence Broken Dear, Harris and Ilett juxtapose the imaginary and the real, creating a poetic and lyrical cycle of choreographed movement and sound.

Emma Connor

2010-02-11T07:38:00.001-08:00

Emma Connor was born in Keighley in 1988. She is currently studying on the BA(Hons) course at Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London.

She recently exhibited in Sequel: a Strang/Slade collaboration, London, 2009. She will take part in Off the Shelf: Word and Image, Live Event, Slade School of Fine Art, London, 2010.

Emma Connor’s work is concerned with an exploration of narratives and spaces that have existed at an earlier time and in a different state. Her time-based work both unravels and knits together histories, through a fusion and synthesis of the physical and material properties of time.

Her new work for Interim employs the sound of the spoken names of students who studied alongside her in 2008. The work is determined and configured through a fusion and alteration of physical sound to form an ambiguous and intangible electronic work.

Barr + Dowler

2010-02-11T07:34:00.000-08:00

Abigail Barr was born in Leeds in 1988; Emily Dowler was born in London in 1988. They are both currently studying Sculpture on the BA(Hons) course at Edinburgh College of Art.

They both took part in Wolstenholme Projects, Liverpool, 2009. They will participate in a forthcoming exhibition organised by the group Bru’d at Edinburgh College of Art, 2010.

Abigail Barr and Emily Dowler’s collaborative work has been informed by the concerns of their individual practices. Abigail Barr has developed work, which exposes and highlights the act of arrangement and placement of sculptural objects. Her method of work is closely connected to the process of drawing, which is characterised by flux and revision. Emily Dowler is interested in the interplay between colour and everyday objects; she explores and exploits the innate colouration of ready-mades in the production of work, which encompasses sculpture, drawing and installation.

In the collaborative sound work Word Association Barr and Dowler have formed a written script derived from a dialogue of questions and answers, which is performed aurally. The work based upon the spontaneous expression of thoughts and words, is responsive and reactive while simultaneously measured and ordered. A metronome is used to provide an aural signal to give the spoken words a similar value and tempo.

interim 2010 artists

2010-02-01T14:01:00.000-08:00

Barr + Dowler
Emma Connor
Dear + Harris + Ilett
Megan Hoyle
Catherine Jones
Anna Rhodes
Rachel Wilson

Video of ex 2009 artists in the basement

2009-11-25T03:50:00.000-08:00

Video showing the work of eliott johnson, michael marczewski and nina wakeford in situ in the ex 2009 exhibition.

click here to go to the video.

nicola celia wright

2009-09-02T05:31:00.000-07:00

Nicola Celia Wright was born in Reading in 1987 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Glasgow School of Art from 2006 to 2009.

She spent four months in the Fine Art Department of Rhode Island
School of Design between September and December 2007.
She recently reviewed Pirate Aesthetics of the Mini-FM by Tetsuo Kogawa for PAR+RS March 2009-07-23 available at www.publicartscotland.com and wrote the essay of mythologies to accompany the exhibition Now I Know My ABC’s, +44 141 Gallery, Glasgow.

She was the recipient of the Glasgow School of Art Dissertation Prize 2009 for her dissertation Between Taxonomies: Curios and the Spaces and Narratives of Curiosity in Collections. She is also a recipient of New Writing Scotland for which she has been commissioned to write three texts for the New Work Scotland Programme, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Oct-Dec 2009.

Wright’s critical writing has always been an important element in her engagement with contextual research and has now taken precedence as a creative practice in itself. The recent completion of her dissertation ‘Between Taxonomies: Curios and the Spaces and Narratives of Curiosity in Collections’ concerned the hermeneutic systems of the museum; her interest lies in that which is sited between the delimitations of taxonomies - which are revealed as governing regulators – and the marginalised, existent in archival spaces, within myth and fiction. Studio based research continues to inform and influence her writing, there being a fluid exchange of ideas between the ‘curatorship’ of visual material within the studio and associative forms of writing, which articulate themselves variously as spoken transcripts, written narratives, or critical texts. Wright works as a writer and, more tentatively, as an artist & curator.

Mixed/Unsorted Lots - Digital Print - 2009

tom walker

2009-09-02T05:26:00.000-07:00

Tom Walker was born in Leeds in 1986 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Chelsea College of Art & Design from 2006 to 2009.

He has recently been included in: Attack of the Anti-Flats, Etcetera Gallery, London; Interim, LCAD, Leeds; XLIV, MXXII, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds; 12 Steps Down, Shoreditch Town Hall, London; Curiosity in Cabinets, Royal Marsden Hospital, London; Play Contra, Nolias Gallery, London.

He recently had the essay, co-authored with Alan Jones, To declare or not to declare, that is the question! Conversations on the Collectivity Symposium published in Chelsea Zeit Magazine, Spring 2009 and the essay System Preferences - Alan Jones and Tom Walker in the middle of ‘no place’ also coauthored with Alan Jones published in Chelsea Zeit Magazine, Summer 2009.

He is currently working on Discussions on ’Futurist Manifesto’ for a new publication.

Walker’s practice presents a critique of rationalism and is concerned with the expression of logic and ideology in lived space. The result of this is that his practice becomes the utilization of the relationship between the literal manifestations of something and its connotative and analogous potential. His work utilizes consistent, formal mechanisms as a means of exposing the structural properties and use value of an ideology and seeks to question the existing language games at play. He explores this by breaking down distinct and recognizable events and objects, particularly ones that are politically charged, into their literal and formal mechanisms. In ex Walker shows two video works: Punk is dead which presents punk simply as the act of jumping up and down and All you have to do is dance to save the world where pole dancing is presented as the act of sliding down a pole. He intentionally presents an ambiguous hierarchy between ideology and technology so as not to impose a closed, dogmatic or didactic position on the viewer, the works encourage debate. For Walker, there can be no space without ideology and this position is consistent throughout his practice.

www.gallery.me.com/walkert3

Windmill and Electric Light (test) - Digital print - 2009

nina wakeford

2009-09-02T05:21:00.000-07:00

Nina Wakeford was born in London in 1968, and trained in sociology and anthropology at Cambridge University (BA Hons) and Oxford University (DPhil) before studying on the foundation course at Leeds College of Art and Design between 2005 and 2006 and then at Goldsmiths, University of London from 2006 to 2009. She currently holds an ESRC Fellowship at Goldsmiths.

She has recently been included in: Punctuation Programme, Limoncello, London; Unhomely, Deptford Art House, London; XLV, MXXXII, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds; Interim, LCAD; The Legacy of 1968, Clore Centre, London; Imagining Business, Oxford Business School, Oxford; What is the Empirical?, Goldsmiths, London. She was invited to produce work at the annual meetings of the Society for Social Studies of Science 2007 (Montreal) and 2008 (Rotterdam) and collaborated on a performance at the Ethnographic Practice in Industry Conference (Copenhagen, 2009).

Wakeford’s recent installations use video and film loops of architectural monuments and juxtapose these with other sculptural or time-based elements. Attempting to refuse a purely nostalgic view of the monuments, Wakeford is interested in the ways in which nostalgia might be questioned by the invocation of other cultural experiences or emotions. In ex she is showing There’s only two only two kinds of people in the world/The ones that participate and the ones that observe which consists of two videos shown on stacked monitors. A video loop of the BT Tower sits on top of a second video recording a group of cheerleaders as they rehearse their routines of throwing and catching each other. Their actions appear to address the character of the tower above. Yet they also generate a momentum that contrasts with the silent, fetishised building, their counting to keep time evidence of participation rather than just observation.
www.ninawakeford.com

‘There’s only two types of people in the world/The ones that
participate and the ones that observe’ - Two looped digital videos - 2009

‘We will replace all men with machines’ - Installation view
Psychelitic stimulation lamp,aluminium, black elastic, 16mm film loop (23 sec) - 2009

sophie thomas

2009-09-02T05:18:00.000-07:00

Sophie Thomas was born in Birmingham in 1986 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2004 and 2005 and then at Goldsmiths, University of London from 2005 to 2009.

She recently exhibited with The Bunker Gallery at NEXT Art Fair, Chicago.

Thomas’ practice is concerned with representations of the animal. She has come to view the animal as a site for fictions; her work makes reference to displays found in museums of natural history, commenting on the institutions’ role in the formation of, and communication of, collective ideas / fictions about nature and the animal. She is interested in working with materials like clay, that have a certain concreteness to them, while representing something that can’t be pinned down and fixed. Her creatures have the look of things wronged, fed up, exhausted, or despondent. Slightly pathetic representatives of their species, they are not sitting pretty. The forms that she makes come close to the ornament but never quite sit comfortably.

Untitled - Clay and Wood - 2009

Untitled - Clay and Wood - 2009

hannah shepherd

2009-09-02T05:15:00.000-07:00

Hannah Shepherd was born in York in 1987 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Glasgow School of Art from 2006 to 2009.

She has recently been included in: The Darker Side of Fairy Tales, Che Camille, Glasgow; New Graduates, Compass Gallery, Glasgow; Unfall, Vic Assembly Gallery, GSA, Glasgow; Beers Barnes Circus : The Big Show, GSA, Glasgow; ELIA Bloom Project, Brussells; Re:do, Domane Marienburg, Hildesheim, Germany; Interim, LCAD, Leeds; SEAsalt, Saltmarket, Glasgow.

She has been selected for the Ars Häme 09 Arts Week, Riihimäki, Finland.

Processes of transformation and change inform Shepherd’s work. In ex she shows the video work Unfall. The piece stems from being shown her great grandmother’s wedding ring. Attracted to the visible effects of time that the ring possessed, she sought to capture something of this transformation and through a consideration of the forces that gradually altered the ring’s surface she saw a connection to the childhood game of hoop rolling. Shepherd made an enlarged replica of the ring, which she rolls through a range of different landscapes and terrains throughout the film. This unconventional companion causes her to travel inefficiently, her movements are neither direct or of a constant speed. We experience a change in the nature of her movements in more densely populated surroundings and become increasingly aware of the potential inappropriateness of the activity for someone who is no longer a child.

Unfall - Digital Video - 2009

michael pollard

2009-09-02T05:10:00.000-07:00

Michael Pollard was born in Leeds in 1987 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Chelsea College of Art & Design from 2006 to 2009.

He has recently been included in: London-Tokyo Project - Walking Distance 119750 Tokyo Version, Annex Gallery, Tokyo; London-Tokyo Project – Walking Distance 119750 London Version, Etcetera Gallery, London; Threads of Sincerity, St Pancras Church, London; XLIII, MXXXII, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds; How Small is Imagination, Chelsea College of Art & Design, London; Attack of the Anti-Flats, Etcetera Gallery, London; Interim, LCAD, Leeds; 12 Steps Down, Shoreditch Town Hall, London; Curiosities in Cabinets, Royal Marsden Hospital, London; Black Dogs vs Werewolves, Dazed and Confused Gallery, London; Play Contra, Nolias Gallery, London.

Based around a multiplicity of minute elements, Pollard’s sculptures err toward an inherent fragility and minimality. He utilises a paused tension of opposing forces in order to create the potential for imminent destruction. Configurations of miniature forms are held in situ with a fleeting sense of permanence. Donguli Rock, the work Pollard will show in ex, comprises of a large plaster form suspended outwards into the space, like a pendulum hovering above the ground. The exact structure holding this is dependant on its surroundings, utilizing and exploiting height and angles with rope, knots and props. Several thousand insignificant, minute chalk nodes sit beneath this imposing structure. Over the course of the exhibition the ropes and knots will gradually stretch, causing the weight to move threateningly close to the vulnerable elements beneath.

Dongoli Rock - Plaster, Chalk, Steel, Ropes - 2009

christopher newlove horton

2009-09-02T05:05:00.000-07:00

Christopher Newlove Horton was born in Leeds in 1986 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Central St Martins College of Art & Design from 2006 to 2009.

He has recently been included in: Moon Dust, La Vachiello, Bologna; Spacecraft, Stoke Newington Library, London; Brouhaha, Etcetera Gallery, London.

Newlove Horton is interested in the relationship between language and time and has recently developed a series of works Parallel Cites, which juxtapose newspaper headlines from different times. Headlines and newspaper stories are, of course, particular to their time. Angle, style, and particularly content, all shift and change along with the time, meaning a newspaper headline acts, to some extent, as an anchor to a specific point within the history of the world. Language is a clear marker of place, and so too are people, actions, attitudes, and perspective. By bringing a headline from the past onto the same plane as one from the present (and visa versa) Newlove Horton aims to situate even the unaware, glancing viewer into a momentary stasis – a plateau or ‘time warp’ where time becomes not static, but circulatory – where time treads water. As the two texts feed into each other, new meanings and contextual relationships are formed. Each headline acts as a coordinate and as they overlap their borders blur and merge to create a previously inaccessible historical and linguistic landscape – a topography repositioned from, but parallel to, our own. For ex he will show a new version of Parallel Cites. An L.E.D sign displays the current day’s main headline as well as its equivalent, from the same date four years previously, when Newlove Horton had just begun the foundation course. In this new version, the work takes on an autobiographical role, mapping the time between then and now; the world having continued to turn.

Parallel Cites - L.E.D display - 2009

harry meadley

2009-09-02T04:56:00.000-07:00

Harry Meadley was born in Leeds in 1987 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Leeds Metropolitan University from 2006 to 2009.

He has recently been included in: superscript, East Street Arts, Leeds; ,,Sammelbände”, East Street Arts, Leeds; ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, Buchmann Galerie, Berlin; Ersatz, Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery, Leeds; Interim, LCAD, Leeds.

He is included in the following publications: A Latento and A Latento 2 –Sammelbände.

He was the director of the gallery MXXXII, a gallery which was located in Meadley’s locker (no.1032) at Leeds Metropolitan University. MXXXII staged 50 solo and group shows throughout 2007 and 2008. www.mxxxii.com

His contribution to Interim in 2008 was to establish the Harry Meadley Prize which has now become an annual prize for fine art students on the foundation course at Leeds College of Art. www.harrymeadleyprize.org.uk

Meadley has become increasingly interested in artistic cryptology. Continually attempting to discern the various algorithms and ciphers embedded in the many parts that make up ’Art’, his works trace the inherent structures he finds, but often encrypting them further into fiendish puzzles that only welcome the most eager of art audiences, or rather, shun the idle ones. For ex Meadley will show two works with an unclear connection – a work exhibited as part of his degree show at Leeds Metropolitan University, Reclining Ghost which is a bench loaned from the Henry Moore Institute and CC a new and permanent work specially installed for ex. CC sees Meadley reclaim the locker he once had whilst a foundation student at Leeds College of Art. In this locker, now fitted with an acrylic door, he will house his entire personal archive, beginning from his Foundation portfolio and notebooks through his degree at Leeds Met and everything else to date, it will be added to over the years until full. The archive will also house his 2008 work Oubliette – a concealed external hard drive containing the only digital files relating to every work he wishes to be forgotten. Like MXXXII this work is only branded by a padlock bearing the lockers number in Roman numerals. The name holder is left blank, like every other. The only record of the lockers owner, recorded in this catalogue and remembered by those that first saw it exhibited.
www.s207554463.co.uk

With an A, but not in that way - Neon - 2009

Harry Meadley Alex Farrar, Xenofon Kavvadias, Phillip Fry, Anthony Burhouse, Kayleigh Brooks, Gillian Holding, Rosie Gammon, Theodore Reeves- Evison, David Steans, R B Grange, Simon Ringe, Alison Brien, Pete Ellis, Jo Ray, Michael Burkitt, Ahn Mi-Ok, Xymphora, Harriet Parry, Charles Sheldon, Patrick Sherwood-Hamilton, Iona Smith, A Little Sum’in Sum’in, Christopher Woodward, Rachel Carter, Mark Tovell, Rob Glew, Nick Pierce, Daniel Hird, Catherine Wilkie, Alex Chocholko, Tom Miles, John Slemensek, Simeon Barclay, Hardeep Pandhal, Paul Smith, Michael Pollard, Tom Walker, Nina Wakeford, Clare Asquith, Zeno Velia and Josephine Flynn - Engraved padlock - 2008

julia mckinlay

2009-09-02T04:51:00.000-07:00

Julia McKinlay was born in York in 1986 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Glasgow School of Art from 2006 to 2009.

She has recently been included in: Descent into the Maelstrom, Southside Studios, Glasgow; Pentagon Gallery, Glasgow; RSA New Contemporaries 2010, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh; Material Reflections, Vic Gallery, Glasgow; Beers Barnes Circus : The Big Show, GSA, Glasgow; Another Place, GSA, Glasgow & Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Art Goes Pop, White Space, GSA, Glasgow; It’s All A Bit Too Casual, GSA, Glasgow; Re:do, Domane Marienburg, Hildesheim, Germany; Interim, LCAD, Leeds; SEAsalt, Saltmarket, Glasgow; Hotel Bloom!, Brussells.

McKinlay makes sculpture that draws upon the strange and surreal structural qualities of natural organisms, becoming half living, half architectural lands and creatures. She has developed a process based practice in which objects evolve from experimenting with materials and processes, from taking photos, making models and drawing. Her work combines industrial materials such as gloss paint, rubber and PVC, with more natural materials such as cement and wood to create tensions between the fabricated quality of the work, and its starting point in the natural world. She has become interested in how synthetic colours can transform natural forms and interact with light and space. Her sculptures investigate scale, and the boundaries of the gallery space, some pieces require the viewer to look up in order to see the whole work, others are floor based and draw attention to the ground, with the intention of creating a physical relationship with the viewer.

Flamingo - Timber,steel, MDF, spray paint - 2009

michael marczewski

2009-09-02T04:36:00.000-07:00

Michael Marczewski was born in Huddersfield in 1987 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Middlesex University from 2006 to 2009.

He has recently been included in Free Range, The Old Truman Brewery, Tatlin’s Tower, Middlesex Project Space, London; Dry Dock 100 Miles Up, Middlesex Project Space, London Interim, LCAD, Leeds; Collaboration Show, Byam Shaw School of Art, London; Artention, The Rag Factory, London. He is about to begin a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design.

Marczewski’s films are concerned with the constraints created by a camera’s limited perspective. He employs two-dimensional still images appropriated from the world of cinema in order to construct three-dimensional miniature sets. This use of reconstructed imagery results in his films becoming replicas of the original, yet strangely removed and distinct. 14.7 Metre Psycho is a redelivery of Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller; stills from the film have been reconstructed into a three-dimensional set, which has then been filmed with a long unedited tracking shot that gradually reveals its own making.

www.mmarczewski.com

14.7 Metre Psycho - Digital video 4min 41secs - 2009

eliott johnson

2009-09-02T04:26:00.000-07:00

Eliott Johnson was born in San Francisco in 1987 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Central St Martins College of Art & Design from 2006 to 2009.

He has recently been included in: Spacecraft, Stoke Newington Library, London; Threads of Sincerity, St Pancras Church, London; Futurefilm, Camden Arts Centre, London; One Foot Cow @ Artful Festival, New Cross Inn, London.

Johnson’s practice is concerned with establishing otherwise veiled relationships between architecture, technology and cultural identity. He primarily uses computer modelling and rendering tools as a platform to explore moments of cultural transition and crossover. He views computer generated imagery – caught as it is between a hobbyist and industrial activity – as an instance of this, where two seemingly disparate applications cross into each other, making the distinction between play and work difficult to discern. These tensions form the backdrop to a practice concerned with how the reproduction and representation of objects and architecture can alter how we perceive and define both culture and our relationship to it.

www.eliottjohnson.com

Mausoleum | Frank Lloyd Wright’s Greater Baghdad, 1958 -
Slide Projection - 2009

Mausoleum | Frank Lloyd Wright’s Greater Baghdad, 1958 -
Slide Projection - 2009

alex farrar

2009-09-02T04:20:00.000-07:00

Alex Farrar was born in Leeds in 1986 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Leeds Metropolitan University from 2006 to 2009. He spent two months at the European Exchange Academy in Berlin between August and September 2008. He is currently based in Amsterdam and is studying at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

He has recently been included in superscript, East Street Arts, Leeds; ,,Sammelbände”, East Street Arts, Leeds; Leeds, Make/Shift, S1 Artspace, Sheffield; Patron Party – A Retropspective, 54 Woodsley Road, Leeds; XL, MXXXII, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds; Eclections, ArtMarket, Leeds; The Battle of Art, Dialogue of Culture, EEA, Beelitz-Heilstätten, Berlin; 12 Shields, Oderbergerstrasse 51, Berlin; EGGS FLOUR MILK CHEESE 25 ways of keeping occupied, 42 New Briggate, Leeds, Interim, LCAD, Leeds; Painting for a Parking Attendant, Leeds University; XV, MXXXII, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds; II, MXXXII, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds; Artgos, ArtMarket, Leeds; Zoo Forty Two, 42 New Briggate, Leeds; Black Dogs vs Werewolves, Dazed and Confused Gallery, London; Lop Lop, Brunswick, Leeds.

He is included in the following publications: A Latento and A Latento 2 – Sammelbänd.

He was the recipient of the EEA Award 2008 and the Edna Lumb Travel Prize 2008.

Farrar manipulates ordinary objects for their performative potential to elicit context-specific scenarios which ludicrously extract the absurd from order. Acknowledging a lack of absolute control he creates the conditions for something to happen, of which an outcome isn’t predetermined but met through an engagement with viewers, location and durational constraints. For ex he will show Alex #1, a life sized doll intended to match his exact dimensions which he made over a 3 month period in Leeds. Alex #1 was made to substitute Farrar’s own presence in situations or locations which he cannot attend. He is currently making a second Alex to be based in Amsterdam and intends to make a new one for every city he subsequently lives in, the previous model always remaining in it’s ‘home town’.

Boulder - Mixed Media - 2008

Alex #1 - Cotton, felt, foam, fake fur, stuffing, aluminium armature, plastic and rubber piping - 2008

hayley dixon

2009-09-02T04:10:00.000-07:00

Hayley Dixon was born in Leeds in 1986 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Middlesex University from 2006 to 2009.

She has recently been included in: Free Range, The Old Truman Brewery, London; The Wedding of Hayley Dixon and Richard Bernard Grange, Middlesex University; XLVI, MXXXII, Leeds Metropolitan University; La Lutte Continue/My Birthday: A celebration of 1968, 2008 and the years in between, Mildmay Social Club and Institute, London; SW1W 9JR, The Transient Gallery, Belgravia, London; 71 Days, The Transient Gallery, Southbank - Pimlico -Westminister, London.

She has been selected to act as an interviewer for The Hut Project: New Contemporaries www.thehutproject.co.uk/newcontemporaries/

Dixon is involved in developing an art practice which explore notions of curation. She believes that by adopting curatorial methods and producing structures for showing the work of others, she is able to filter her position and how she is viewed, and establish one that is reviewed as a secondary mechanism to these pieces. Her recent work makes reference to the system of Salon hanging, where the maximum possible amount of works are exhibited on a gallery wall, she takes this method to extreme conclusions by calculating the smallest surface area possible to display the work which she curates. By using a mathematical system, works can be defined by dimension, and appear in accordance to this, and to the space in which they will be shown. This often requires her to cut up and dissect works in order to incorporate them within the system. The employment of a curatorial method based upon practicality removes subjectivity, and holds the role of the maker suspended between artist and curator. She will be making a new piece for ex formed from works which have been donated by the other artists in the exhibition. The work will, in effect, be a collaboration between Dixon and the other participants in ex 2009.

Why I never became a pianist - Nightswimming - Video - 2008

The efficient curation of 2 dimensional rectangular objects – Mixed Media Installation - 2009

Alex Chocholko

2009-09-02T03:57:00.000-07:00

Alex Chocholko was born in Leeds in 1987 and studied at Leeds College of Art between 2005 and 2006 and then at Middlesex University from 2006 to 2009.

He has recently been included in Free Range, The Old Truman Brewery,
London; XXXIII, MXXXII, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds; Interim, LCAD, Leeds; 71 Days, The Transient Gallery, Southbank - Pimlico - Westminister, London.

He works at London Miles Gallery www.londonmiles.com and also as an assistant to the artist Paul Johnson
www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artistspaul_johnson.htm

Chocholko is interested in the application of futile systems and in the performative act of making. In recent site-specific works he has used sets of instructions and rules to determine and plot construction lines that intersect and partly cover the architectural space. The process of developing work is akin to problem solving, here the basic physical properties of materials, such as their length, thickness and tensile strength are carefully measured in relation to the specific space and utilized in a calculated way to generate drawn networks. Both the method and the work are playful and surprising. Chocholko will make a new piece of work for ex, engaging with a site in the Vernon Street building.

Untitled (installation) - Gaffer tape - 2009

Untitled - Whipping twine, panel pins - 2008

ex 2009 artists

2009-09-02T03:11:00.000-07:00

christopher newlove horton

ex 2009 essay : an abridged history of curiosity

2009-09-02T03:02:00.000-07:00

collected for return

‘So that representation, perpetually bound to contents so close to one another, repeats itself, recalls itself, duplicates itself quite naturally, causes almost identical impressions to arise again and again, and engenders imagination.’1

Discussing the works assembled in ex is to discuss a history of curiosity; a history which finds itself rooted in the spaces in which we encounter these works. Repeated and restated within these spaces, the works’ collective claim to an inherited history becomes apparent, a history both engendered by, and engendering, curiosity.

The early modern period represented a culture in which the relationship between the collecting compulsion, disquisition and interrogation became inextricably entwined under the rubric or habit of curiosity. Voyages of discovery revealed ‘new worlds’ and ever expanding limits where curiosity represented not only a desire for knowledge, but in the face of increasing mercantile power, a desire for individual power through unsanctioned knowledge; a mark of discontent.

The origins of museums - wunderkammer - cabinets of wonder or curiosity, were personalised collections both eclectic and disparate in their design, typified by the accumulation and juxtaposition of artificial and natural curiosities. These collections were characterised by their preoccupation with the ‘curio’ or singular object - a disorganisation of rarities, which could best be described as encyclopaedic, and largely unspecialised. To a contemporary viewer, it is difficult to discern any kind of veritable classificatory system; however, the apparent disorder of Renaissance cabinets can reveal carefully constructed narratives - taxonomies of tangential and associative connections. These collected specimens and objects could be juxtaposed and arranged by the similitudes of congenital qualities, seeking to understand the world by evidencing likenesses. In this way, it was perfectly judicious to sit pinecones by the side of hedgehogs.

‘The ‘cabinet of the world’ had to manifest the similitudes which crossed the entire known world. This could best be achieved by assimilating, and therefore controlling, the most diverse and strange objects: the extremities of the world’.2

Curiosity represents the extremes of existence - and in order to represent the whole world, the curio, as an object ‘on the edge’ as it were, also represents knowledge of the ‘interior’. A collection of curios denotes not only ‘what is known’, but conversely, sitting on the borders or periphery of knowledge, what is still unknown - and as such, can only be defined a ‘curio’ because of its ‘unknowability’. The collected object is a fragment, dislocated from origin and the collection itself is a mirrored, artificial world, abstracted from reality; organised within these temporally suspended realms, objects pertain to the narrative which ensnares them - that of the collector. The collection asserts itself as autobiography.

On show is a collection in itself; ex represents a selection of work from students, now artists, at the end of their (our) current studies. While each work is varied and distinct from the next, representing a discursive course through diverse interests, intents, contexts and modes of production, the siting of the exhibition at Leeds College of Art is a return to an origin for each artist who began their studies here, recognising an identified interiority. This collection asserts itself, perhaps less as an ‘autobiography’, but as a collective history, a circular narrative which ends, as it began, at a point of genesis. Rather than inhabiting the sepulchral, retrospective nature of the museum, ex is averse to dusty nostalgia, and as much as it revisits ‘where it all began’, it also marks another beginning, as each artist enters the professional stage of their careers; it represents challenges and chases still unknown.

Art school often seemed bewildering – leaving art school seems even more so – being the first step to running the gauntlet of residencies, awards, dealers, exhibitions, galleries, reviews and grants which (supposedly) lend initiates validity. While the passage to come remains uncertain, built as it is on a shifting, fluctuating foundation of possibilities (this too characterised by its unknowability) the works which are exhibited here seem to reside in a resting place, poised before the tempest. Bringing together this confluence of narratives sees works gathering new associations and alliances, and perhaps some confidence, narratives which might only inhabit spaces together for the first or second (and possibly last?) time. Each one of these works, uttered through individual vernaculars, commingles to vivify a mixed range of discourses and in protean form the space becomes a place for dialogue, for meetings and reciprocal exchange.

As curiosities allowed early collectors ‘access to invisible worlds by enabling them to piece together fragments of the visible world’3 - their methodologies loosening categories in being both indirect and lyrical, the works here find compatriotism in that they are all ‘in pursuit’. Artists create trajectories between worlds - they question, but the thrill is in the hunt, in curiosity - the query taking precedence over categorical or prescriptive answers. Curiosity relies on looking between and outside fixed meaning - and recognizing that while every answer gains an opposite idiom, they do not always have to exist as separate, discrete factions. Perhaps they do not reject conventional modes of knowledge so much as instigate singular enquiries into the existent dominant hierarchies, seeking what is uncertain and unsanctioned. They interrogate their ‘knowns’ and upset the ontologies of their investigations. While these works could be classified as poetic, confrontational, uncanny, they are never so reductive in articulating their own delimitations, existing outside of the regulating precincts of prevailing frameworks and disrupting equilibriums. Even as the artist engages the commonplace, or conventions of their own construction and control, the everyday is transformed and brought to occupy peripheral territories.

The works are encountered on stairwells, in corridors, provoking moments of unexpected arrest and creating fissions between both the presented pieces and their surroundings. They inhabit, rather than impose on the building, which becomes a conduit to how we confront and navigate the works. This spatial experience of the exhibition maintains our own ‘curious gaze’; a gaze that searches out things not yet seen, antithetic to the ‘enlightened’ empirical and restricted vision which replaced that of the first curio collectors. Displayed without assertive agendas, we are invited to establish our own connections between works.

ex is an anthology of journeys - like that of the Renaissance explorer, traversing beyond his ‘known’, these objects, brought back from their destinations, lend the detail and the colour to their constituent narratives – they are objects still invested with the travellers curiosity, perhaps less returned than still in motion, artefacts through which the journey is kept alive with possibilities. Works lead us throughout this derivation, but punctuate the space as protagonists who last met together in a prologue, converging again here where they are re-called and re-told as anecdotal forms, multilateral in their significations. The curation of this exhibition is much like the wunderkammer; residing within the ‘gaps’ and through - spaces of the building it holds no categories, no hierarchies or classifications as an unspecialised (dis) organisation of rarities. Congruously, the connections we find between these works are personal and associative, their only concrete relation being that they are compellingly hosted in a site of origin, fragments of journeys not yet completed. This history of curiosity can only ever be abridged, because the greater part of it lies in potential, in expectations, in what is still to come.

Nicola Celia Wright 2009

1. Michel Foucault. The Order of Things. (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002 c.1970) p.78

2. Sean Hides ‘The Genealogy of Material Culture and Cultural Identity’ in Pearce, Susan M (ed.) Experiencing Material Culture in the Western World (pp.11-32) (London: Leicester University Press; Cassell Imprint, 1997) p.18

3. Neil Kenny The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p.1

ex 2009 introduction

2009-09-02T02:20:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 2009 the fine art staff of Leeds College of Art’s foundation course visited the degree shows of all former foundation students who graduated last year. This involved seeing the culmination of three years study at some fourteen fine art programmes throughout the country: Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland, Falmouth in the South East of England, all the major London schools, Nottingham, Manchester and of course, Leeds itself. Ex was selected from these visits. The standard of work was very high and this is reflected in the increased number of artists that we have included in this years exhibition.

We have invited Nicola Celia Wright to contribute to ex by writing this year’s catalogue essay. Nicola graduated from the Sculpture and Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art. She has been awarded the New Writing Scotland commission to write the catalogue texts for the New Work Scotland programme, which will be shown at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Oct-Dec 2009.

Sean Kaye 2009

interim 2009

2009-03-11T10:33:00.001-07:00

19 March 09 to 03 April 09
9am to 4pm monday to friday not open weekends

featuring the
Harry Meadley Prize 2009

the free studio

2009-03-11T10:24:00.001-07:00

The Free Studio are Josh Whitaker who was born in Leeds in 1987 and Callum Crawford was born in Wakefield in 1987. Whitaker is currently on the Fine Art (Print & Digital Media) course at Wimbledon School of Art whilst Crawford is currently on the Fine Art course at Central St Martins School of Art & Design.

Whitaker and Crawford have been collaborating on a project entitled The Free Studio since October 2008. It is a site free from material constraints, which seeks to create a space within which ideas can exist autonomously.

The Free Studio currently takes the form of the type of ephemera produced by existing galleries and institutions i.e. press releases, posters and publications. It provides a multi-disciplinary platform upon which critical dialogues occur. It is open to proposals from any field of creative thought, without the restriction of materialisation and with an emphasis on collaboration. In the future The Free Studio hopes to expand and focus on its collaborative nature reinforcing its position as a real gallery providing a research space for ideas and as an evolving artwork. Interim is the first public presentation of The Free Studio and its ideas.

townend + sands

2009-03-11T10:23:00.002-07:00

Adam Townend was born in Dewsbury in 1987; Arron Sands was born in Bradford in 1988. They are both currently on the BA Sculpture and Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art.

They recently exhibited at Garage Space, Glasgow 2008, White Space, Glasgow 2008, in Draw and Order, 58 West Prices Street, Glasgow, 2008; Desire and Transformation, Hillhead Artists Space, Glasgow, 2008. They have a forthcoming exhibition at NPK Church, Glasgow.

Townend & Sands collaborative practice is a result of two separate lines of enquiry, a combination of astrology and the extra-terrestrial object and the oddities of ecological mythology. In their work Tensile Strength a balloon (fit to burst) hovers above a free standing red brick structure awaiting a physical trigger which will release the balloon and its contents into its interior. They are interested in the physicality and pathos of constructed spectacles to distance the audience before revealing a truth.

david edwards

2009-03-11T10:23:00.001-07:00

David Edwards was born in Milton Keynes in 1988. He is currently on the BA Fine Art course at Central St Martins College of Art & Design.

He recently showed at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, 2008; Future Film, Camden Arts Centre, London, 2008.

Edward’s current interests lie in the generation of polyphonic composition through applying musical systems to mundane situations. He has experimented with ascribing sounds and notes to specific objects or actions that he has previously filmed. These range from a film of him performing simple actions such as head and hand movements to a film of a group of pigeons moving around a city square. These experiments have resulted in a series of humorous video pieces where a sense of anticipation and tension is achieved through isolating sections of the body in motion.

lucy crouch

2009-03-11T10:22:00.002-07:00

Lucy Crouch was born in Wakefield in 1987. She is currently on the BA Fine Art course at Chelsea College of Art & Design.

She recently showed in Small Things Surrounding (But Not Necessarily About) Time, 25 Gellatly Road, London, 2008.

Crouch is concerned with the physical and human act of making work, an act which may be labour intensive but sensitive, brutal yet quiet. She is interested in a poetic longing for something distant and a desire to preserve fleeting moments. Her work sits in a territory somewhere between photography, drawing and sculpture. She is involved in a transformative process, achieved through the meticulous use of repetition, which deals with a yearning for the other. She has been involved in making a series of vigorously executed yet delicate line drawings that alter photographs of the surface of water, alluding to a mountainous landscape. She is also involved in developing a series of works which deal with the trace of a physical space. The act of pressing pencil to paper on wall is important in the act of making these drawings, together with a wish to discover the potential in the unnoticed and the absent.

tom cookson

2009-03-11T10:22:00.001-07:00

Tom Cookson was born in Huddersfield in 1987. He is currently on the BA Fine Art course at Leeds College of Art & Design.

He recently showed in Klanging Banging, Neville Street, Leeds, 2008; Industrial Sabotage, Armley Mills, Leeds, 2008; Northern Art Show, Harrogate, 2008; Strangely Familiar, PSL, Leeds, 2008. He is to be included in Expo09, Leeds, 2009.

Cookson’s current interests lie predominantly with the manipulation of ‘found sounds’ and footage from his large archive of home videos to create unworldly and dreamlike situations. He is interested in the relationship between ancient, mystic technologies and their modern equivalents in an attempt to upgrade the ancient. Native Americans believed the night air was filled with dreams both good and bad, they would hang dream catchers in their homes that catch the dreams as they float by. In a similar way, information in the form of radio waves and digital signals really do fill the air and are received by satellite dishes.

In Cookson’s Dream Dish Model: TC08 a TV is hooked up to a modified satellite dish and plays the ‘filtered airwaves’ showing only Native American culture and prophecies. The irony of this is that Native Americans were victims of the most successful extermination in history. Instead of filtering dreams, the dream dish filters out their terrible past and receives what is beautiful about their culture.

The harry meadley prize

2009-03-11T09:55:00.000-07:00

more details at
http://www.harrymeadleyprize.org.uk

interim 2009 artists

2009-03-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

tom cookson
lucy crouch
david edwards
townend + sands
the free studio

interim 2009 introduction by simon wallis

2009-03-11T08:31:00.000-07:00

artschool confidential

Going to artschool was, truth be told, the only option for me - at the time I wouldn’t have fitted in (or been accepted) anywhere else, being neither particularly academic or at all clear about what I wanted to do with my life. Artschool seemed to be a good place to experiment and find a direction. It was somewhere you had to exercise a high degree of self-discipline, as there were no regular lectures to attend, essays to produce, or grades to achieve. It forced you to take responsibility and look outside the institution – to use the city, its museums, galleries, music venues, parks, football grounds, clubs and pubs as part of the ‘syllabus’.

It also meant that you had to forge alliances with other students who would go on to be your peer group. The like-minded people around you who could provide a context for your work, became the critics and audience. If you’re a good conversationalist and listener artschool can provide you with regular immediate feedback on your work, the like of which you’ll get rarely in life after college.

After my UK degree I went on to art college in the States and was amazed to find highly entrepreneurial students who made the time to furnish themselves with marketable skills, so that, if need be, a living was always possible away from the lottery of selling art. It had to be as there was no state support and North Americans are essentially pragmatists. These student artists window-dressed, did graphic and interior design jobs, worked as artist assistants, taught night classes, worked in publishing – things that brought in much more money than the passive shop or bar work I was used to, making life as an artist financially viable.

The means of artistic production have now exploded beyond my wildest Walkman dreams of 1987. We had a department called ‘alternative media’ – essentially a room with a photocopier. I took no more than 30 photos a week as I couldn’t easily afford to develop the film. You’ve never had it so good, I’m jealous – if you’ve got a Mac there is nothing technically you can’t do, but then again a pencil is always pretty good too.

In terms of art history and current events in the artworld it always pays to put in the legwork – see all the shows at the weekends, go to all the openings, buy the magazines and the catalogues, read and write the blogs and reviews. Travel, debate, form allegiances, create supporters, read novels, volunteer, intern - you know the drill: the harder you work, the luckier you’ll become.

It’s great that this small show here is a valuable part of sharing and testing work, I enjoyed thinking about what I did as a student and how I still make professional use of it. But more importantly I value experiencing the work of artschool graduates as they enrich, scramble, contest and rebuild the artworld, contributing to what I consider to be an essential part of a good life. Long live artschool in whatever inescapable changing form it takes.
Simon Wallis
Director The Hepworth, Wakefield
(opening 2010)

interim 2009 introduction by juan cruz

2009-03-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

shifting aspirations

In the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama’s election many intellectual American commentators pondered the question of what they might now do with their scepticism. For years they had grown used to maintaining a position at odds with the political system and now that they found their values more closely represented in the figure of the new president they wondered where to place their cynicism and disdain. Would these attitudes, they wondered, come to be recognised as having been the affliction of a certain weird generation who had allowed themselves to become alienated from mainstream politics?
It’s well documented that the visual arts now play a much more central cultural and economic role than they ever did.Many contextual studies’ syllabuses explore this phenomenon and rightly point towards the critical issues at stake in what is broadly considered to be the growing instrumentalisation of art.They discuss the manner in which Arts Council policy under the Blair government strove to demand of art an explicit social function, an almost altruistic demeanor. They also look at the way in which artists and collectives have become involved in producing works that engender direct social effect and consider the extent to which these practices manage to straddle the fine line between being part of the solution and part of the problem.

At a recent symposium at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, organised by Art Monthly as an extension to a polemic article that had been published in the previous months around the future of art education, much discussion revolved around the kinds of structures that it might be possible for artschools to adopt in order to continue operating in some kind of recognisable form. Many in the panel claimed that one of the greatest obstacles to the perpetuation of artschools as we knew them was the mindset of the students themselves, who now demanded a greater degree of security about the academic value of their degrees and about the professional destinations that might attend them beyond graduation. The panel put this down to prior educational experiences that had encouraged students to become more demanding of their teachers and keener to receive feedback about their progress. Today’s students, the complaint continued, are no longer prepared to consider their experience in artschool as an end in itself but instead require their courses to provide them with a sound and accountable base for their future professional development. The panel lamented the fact that it was so difficult to teach students who had clearly lost touch with the aspirations towards freedom that had guided their own careers and who instead strove to obtain jobs and mortgages.

Clearly no-one would disagree that it’s important to listen to students whose motivations to be artists might be very different from those that guided the lecturers who teach them. What is more difficult for many artschools is to come to terms with the consequences of that consideration, as they may well challenge some very deeply held values
and assumptions. Perhaps that’s why the mindset of students is so often lamented by their teachers, because it challenges their own well developed sense of otherness. But rather than despair at what is often characterised as the growing bureaucratisation of the young,
perhaps we might do well to consider the challenge that they are posing to our own
assumptions about what might constitute such values as freedom and resistance.

Juan Cruz
Artist & Head of Department - Arts
Liverpool John Moores University

current exhibition : ex 2008

2008-09-09T05:46:00.000-07:00

18.09.08 - 03.10.08
9 a.m. - 4 p.m.
weekdays only.

www.leeds-art.ac.uk

0113 202 8106

interim 2008 artists

2008-09-09T05:43:00.000-07:00

alex chocholko
alex farrar
michael marczewski
harry meadley
julia mckinley
michael pollard
shepherd and wright
nina wakeford
tom walker

current exhibition : ex 2008

2008-09-09T05:28:00.000-07:00

18.09.08 - 03.10.08
9 a.m. - 4 p.m.

ric warren

2008-09-08T06:17:00.002-07:00

Ric Warren was born in Barnsley in 1986 and studied at Leeds College of Art & Design between 2004 and 2005 and then at Glasgow School of Art from 2005 to 2008.

He has recently been included in: Old and New, Pentagon Gallery, LindArt Artists Colony, Lendava, Slovinia; Edinburgh Arts Festival, Charlotte Square Gardens, Edinburgh; Big in Falkirk, Falkirk; Structural Relations, Material Inequalities & Social Circumstance, Front Space Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow; Nice Ensemble, Arlington Street, Glasgow; Of Multiple Occupancy, Berkeley Street, Glasgow.

He has been selected for Roar!, Bargehouse, London; RSA New Contemporaries 2009, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.

He has recently completed a residency at LindArt Fine Arts Colony, Lendeva, Slovenia and has been awarded the John Kinross Scholarship enabling him to travel to Florence for 3 months towards the end of 2008.

Warren is interested in the changes of our built environment (physically, politically, culturally and environmentally) and repeatedly attempts to hypothesise potential conclusions of such adjustments to our habitat. He finds inspiration from the structures and materials that compose our manmade surroundings and is particularly interested in architecture. His work primarily manifests itself in the form of sculptural installations, yet he consider drawing as an equally important aspect of his creative practice and process. Spaces that are visually concealed or made physically inaccessible intrigue him and he explores these concerns within his work. His structures and models often attempt to mimic the language of architecture, or intervene with it, to create buildings that hold space, but do not offer it. Similarly, his drawings take the guise of working engineering drawings, yet are intentionally flawed to render them void of their supposed “function”.

He is also an active member of the collective art group TOOMANYARTISTS.

www.ricwarren.blogspot.com

www.toomanyartists.blogspot.com

helen shaddock

2008-09-08T06:17:00.001-07:00

Helen Shaddock was born in Dewsbury in 1986 and studied at Leeds College of Art & Design between 2004 and 2005 and then at Glasgow School of Art from 2005 to 2008.

She has recently been included in: Old and New, Pentagon Gallery, Glasgow; Glasgow International Artists Bookfair, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow; Not Your Average Evening Event, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow; RSA Student Exhibition, The Mound, Edinburgh; Textual Healing, The Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh; Special Collections, The University of Leeds Gallery, Leeds.

She has been selected for RSA New Contemporaries 2009, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and is the joint organiser of the Glasgow International Artists Bookfair.

Shaddock’s work stems from a fascination with organised information and with colour. She is interested in how the repetition of a controlled process can lead to unexpected results. She employs obsessive tendencies to take simple activities or actions to an extreme, often creating bizarre and unpredictable results.

www.helenshaddock.com

giles ripley

2008-09-08T06:14:00.000-07:00

Giles Ripley was born in Huddersfield in 1986 and studied at Leeds College of Art & Design between 2004 and 2005 and then at Chelsea College of Art & Design from 2005 to 2008.

He has recently been included in: Departures, The White Nave, Dover; Anticipation, Selfridges Ultralounge, London; XHIBIT 2008, The Hub Gallery, London; Sharp Shorts, The Hub Gallery, London; Vault, Shoreditch Town Hall Basement, London; MC Motors, Millers Avenue, London, Some Quiet Pursuit, The House Gallery, London.

He is included in the following forthcoming exhibitions: New Contemporaries 2008, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; Best In Show, John Jones Project Space, London.

Ripley’s work engages with the human condition. He is interested in making visible the various contradictions of the self and the compromising nature of human behaviour. Fictional events in his work are often elaborations on something real; exaggerated accounts of mundane experiences. The paradoxical duality between hope and failure in the comic hero has been extremely significant to his interpretation of such behaviour. The notion of a central character and a world that revolves around him is integral to both the work produced and to the manner in which it is made. Though initially a time saving choice, his decision to work with a lo-fi aesthetic and with as few people as possible in the production of his films, has become a focus of the work itself. His own limitations as a filmmaker and a performer are linked to his concerns with hope and failure in the comic hero. Ripley’s work sits between the allure of the slick realm of generic cinema and the assumed integrity of fine art. Rather than a hindrance, the unsure territory of his work provides the opportunity to explore the similarities and differences between these seemingly separate fields.

www.gilesripley.com

alison livesey

2008-09-08T06:13:00.000-07:00

Alison Livesey was born in Huddersfield in 1984 and studied at Leeds College of Art & Design between 2004 and 2005 and then at Manchester Metropolitan University from 2005 to 2008.

She has recently been included in: Paint-o-Rama, Northern Quarter, Manchester.

Livesey’s work explores a desire for order. She employs sets of rules which she then follows to a preordained end. She is interested in the tension created between the fragility of the materials she uses and the precision of the system that she employs. By carefully dipping string into pigment, before attaching it to a series of nails accurately measured along the side of a stretcher, the string is snapped onto the surface of unprimed canvas. In this manner a series of precise lines are gradually built up which results in a complex grids at odds with the ephemeral nature of the materials employed.

nichollas humphrey

2008-09-08T06:12:00.001-07:00

Nicholas Humphrey was born in Leeds in 1982 and studied at Leeds College of Art & Design between 2003 and 2004 and then at Chelsea College of Art & Design from 2004 to 2008.

He has recently been included in: Brickman 120ft Tall, McGregor Courtyard, Chelsea College of Art & Design, London; House, Lower Grosvenor Place, Belgravia, London; Trinity 06, Trinity Buoy Wharf, London; Nowhere Now Here, St. Pancras Parish Church Crypt, London; Royal Melbourne Inst of Technology Project, Internet Based Collaboration, London & Melbourne, Australia.

He is currently a production assistant at Artangel and is included in the following forthcoming exhibitions: Nicholas Humphrey, Fontana Gallery, Carrer del Topazi, Barcelona, Spain; The Way Things Were, The Kings Road, Chelsea, London.

Humphrey’s works often come from ideas or proposals by other artists which, for various and varied reasons, have remained unrealised. He does not actively seek out unrealised proposals but becomes aware of them through their status as being collectively known and retold. As a result the proposals he works with inevitably differ from the true original. They are coloured by their many retellings and are filtered through a collective unconscious. What results is not a straight realisation of the original proposal but inevitably a new work.

www.nichollashumphrey.com

joel dever

2008-09-08T06:11:00.001-07:00

Joel Dever was born in Leeds in 1986 and studied at Leeds College of Art & Design between 2004 and 2005 and then at Byam Shaw School of Art from 2005 to 2008.

He has recently been included in: Archway Project, Hill House, London; D.O.E.S., The Foundry, London; UNIT, Whittington House, London.

Dever has developed a performance practice which is at once both playful and sincere. He is interested in the use of the absurd in order to explore our assumptions of the everyday. He utilises common objects such as step ladders and inflatable chairs as performative devices to carry out simple tasks in an illogical manner. They often explore the suspense of waiting for something or for nothing to happen. Full of contradictions, the performances are at once gentle and subversive, anarchic and mundane.

During ex Dever will perform the following works:

Lifesupportmachine at 7.30pm on Wednesday 17th September.

Ladder (Jericho) at 2.30pm on Thursday 19th September

Concorde at 2.30pm on Monday 22nd September

Ladder (Jericho) at 2.30pm on Thursday 25th September

Concorde at 2.30pm on Monday 29th September

Ladder (Jericho) at 2.30pm on Thursday 2nd October

tom badley

2008-09-08T06:10:00.001-07:00

Tom Badley was born in Aylesbury in 1985 and studied at Leeds College of Art & Design between 2003 and 2004 and then at the Slade School of Fine Art from 2004 to 2008. He spent six months at the Cooper Union, New York in 2006.

He has recently been included in: Elevator Gallery, London; A Stain Upon The Silence, Central St Martins, London; Omsk, Omsk Screening Space, London; Framed, Woburn Research Space, London.

He is included in the following forthcoming exhibitions: Best In Show, John Jones Project Space, London.

Badley is fascinated by themes of destruction, catastrophe and fragmentation. He is particularly concerned with investigating the idea of 'Seamless Breakage': the paradoxical process whereby things avert death through various forms of auto-destruction. Extending across biology, media, geometry, surgical procedure and music, Badley identifies Seamless Breakage as both naturally occurring and an important aspect of our very unique historical moment. His fragmentary video pieces utilize found material from the Internet. Mining thousands of videos from sites such as Youtube, this content is cut - through highly labour intensive editing techniques - to produce music. Struggle and Invention uses over six hundred different downloaded videos to piece together a Fugue by J.S.Bach. As climactic and visually violent pieces, the viewer sees both original material, and its gradual transformation. At first the edits appear uncomfortably random, breaking the narratives of the individual videos. As music starts to emerge, a completeness is achieved through utter fragmentation.

www.tombadley.net

ex 2008 artists

2008-09-08T06:03:00.000-07:00

tom badley
joel dever
nichollas humphrey
alison livesey
giles ripley
helen shaddock
ric warren

current exhibition

2008-09-05T13:31:00.000-07:00

ex 2007 artists

2008-09-05T08:12:00.000-07:00

michael burkitt
callum cuthbert
jane fawcett
jon garlick
fiona-grady
tom heslop
matthew robinson
tom sander

what is ex and interim?

2008-09-05T04:26:00.000-07:00

Ex and Interim are part of the exhibitions programme at Leeds College Of Art. Find out more by clicking on the logo below.

ex
ex is an annual exhibition profiling a selection of artists at the beginning of their careers who have recently graduated. The exhibition highlights the quality and range of work being produced on some of Britain's leading fine art degrees.

All of the artists taking part completed their foundation course at Leeds College of Art & Design and have been selected following visits to a wide range of degree shows by staff teaching on the fine art area of the course.

The exhibition celebrates relationships formed whilst studying on the foundation course and reconnects artists, now based in other cities, with each other, with Leeds and with the College.

interim

Interim is an annual exhibition open to all current second year BA Fine Art students at British art schools who have previously completed their foundation course at Leeds College of Art & Design. The show is selected by members of staff from the foundation course in conjunction with guest selectors.

tom walker

2008-09-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

Tom Walker was born in Leeds in 1986. He is currently on the BA Fine Art course at Chelsea College of Art & Design.

He recently showed in 12 Steps Down at Shoreditch Town Hall, London. He is to be included in the following forthcoming exhibitions: Curiosity in Cabinets at Royal Marsden Hospital, London in April 2008 and also in Kiwon and the Antiflats at Etcetera Gallery, London in May 2008.

Walker’s work for Interim is a reconfiguration of a wooden door. The door is sawn into planks of similar length to create a series of units on which the surface details such as the handle, the keyhole and the letter box are left in place. These units are reconstructed using dry joints to create a labyrinth like sculpture.

nina wakeford

2008-09-04T08:56:00.000-07:00

Nina Wakeford was born in London in 1968. She is currently on the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Her recent projects include an installation to accompany the What is the Empirical conference at Goldsmiths and an installation and performance to accompany the Presidential Session at the Social Studies of Science conference, Montreal. Her forthcoming exhibitions and projects include a group exhibition at Deptford Art House, London in May 2008; work accompanying the Imagining Business conference at Oxford University in June 2008; an installation for The Legacy of 1968 at the Clore Centre, University of London in June 2008 and an installation for the Social Studies of Science Conference, Rotterdam in August 2008.

Wakeford is interested in creating situations that unsettle our traditional view of systems and materials. Much of her work begins with everyday situations and repetitive actions. Her piece for Interim ‘Right Hand Red’ is a sound work which leaves the audience wondering how to understand the instructions which are being broadcast, whether to listen as if they were orders, enjoy them as part of a game, or think of them as part of a language exercise. By employing a Chinese speaker who translates the results of a Twister spinner, the audience may begin to imagine global regimes which go beyond the local situation.

shepherd & wright

2008-09-04T08:51:00.000-07:00

Hannah Shepherd was born in York in 1987, Nicola Wright was born in Reading in 1987. They are both currently on the BA Sculpture and Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art.

They have a forthcoming show at White Space, Glasgow in April 2008.

Shepherd and Wright are interested in the
home made and in a nostalgia for specific objects and experiences. Their piece for Interim, Old Dog, New Tricks is a floor level video projection of two sets of feet tap dancing side by side. One of the performers is familiar with the performative act of tap dancing whilst the other is not. Corrective heels based upon those found in Glasgow’s Huntarian museum are worn by the performer to which dance is unfamiliar. The action is performed both simultaneously and in turn in order to heighten the difference in their varying abilities. The wood turned heels oscillate between being a hindrance and a help. While the corrective shoes are taken from medicine ‘to attempt to correct physiological flat feet, knock knees or bow legs’ the makeshift solution of the heels act as a prop or support to the dancer, referencing dance posture and the Cuban heels of traditional dance footwear.

michael pollard

2008-09-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

Michael Pollard was born in Leeds in 1987. He is currently on the BA Fine Art course at Chelsea College of Art & Design.

He recently showed in 12 Steps Down, Shoreditch Town Hall, London; Black Dogs Vs Werewolves, Dazed and Confused Gallery, London; Play Contra, Nolias Gallery, London. He is to be included in Kiwon and the Antiflats at Etcetera Gallery, London in May 2008.

Pollard’s work is concerned with the use of repetition and process. Room of Pots viii (optimum height) is a representation of an ongoing process: the production of miniature ceramic vessels. The size of the vessels is in direct contrast to their quantity within the installation, which also serves to highlight the intricacy of detail and the inherent differences of each ceramic. By siting the piece at eye level one is discouraged from an immediate overview, and is instead encouraged to look through and within the simplicity of elements thus submerging the viewer.

julia mckinley

2008-09-04T07:46:00.000-07:00

Julia McKinlay was born in York in 1986. She is currently on the BA Sculpture and Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art.

She recently showed work in Project Bloom in Brussels in 2007.

McKinlay’s work has been informed by an interest in natural history, archaeology and botany. She has made work exploring these concerns in sculpture video and print. McKinlay’s piece for Interim consists of a sculptural form derived from the fabric pattern for a cloak, alongside a sinister photograph of this ‘Red Riding Hood’ cloak and a photograph of the cochineal insects used for the dyeing process.

harry meadley

2008-09-04T07:43:00.000-07:00

Harry Meadley was born in Leeds in 1987. He is currently on the BA Fine Art course at Leeds Metropolitan University.

His recent exhibitions and projects include: Rock Paper Scissors, Buchmann Galerie, Berlin; Zoo Forty Two, 42 New Briggate, Leeds; Black Dogs Vs Werewolves, Dazed and Confused Gallery, London; A Latento, Book Art Bookshop, London / Bookie Woekie, Amsterdam / Printed Matter, New York. He is also the director of the gallery MXXX11, a gallery which is located in Meadley’s locker in Leeds Metropolitan University. MXXX11 has staged 30 solo and group exhibitions to date.

Meadley states that the foundation course was a crucial part of his life and played a major part in the development of his current practice. For Interim he has established the Harry Meadley Prize which is open to students studying in the fine art area on this years foundation course. A selection committee will shortlist three students whose work will be included in Meadley’s space within the Interim exhibition. A judging panel consisting of eminent artists and curators will select the prize winner. The winning student will receive the Harry Meadley Prize trophy and £250 to be used to towards realising their final project. The two other shortlisted students will each receive £50. The Harry Meadley Prize will be presented at the Interim private view.

michael marczewski

2008-09-04T07:38:00.000-07:00

Michael Marczewski was born in Huddersfield in1987 He is currently on the BA Fine Art course at Middlesex University.

He recently exhibited in a collaborative exhibition between students of Middlesex University and Byam Shaw School of Art in Feb 2008.

Marczewski’s work for Interim is a film from an ongoing series entitled ‘Envirsumental’. In this work a landscape containing bizarre elements creates an odd and infected environment. What begins with trees and grass blowing in the wind is unsettled by a strange opaque blob of oil that starts to rise from a mound of soil and drips up into the air. This is followed by four more drips that turn into consistent rising lines of oil, which sway gently in the breeze.

alex farrar

2008-09-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

Alex Farrar was born in Leeds in 1986. He is currently on the BA Fine Art course at Leeds Metropolitan University.

His recent exhibitions and projects include: Zoo Forty Two, 42 New Briggate, Leeds; A Latento, Book Art Bookshop, London / Bookie Woekie, Amsterdam / Printed Matter, New York.

Farrar has produced a site specific soundtrack which will be played throughout the studios and public spaces of the building. He has compiled a tape of Muzak in an attempt to increase student productivity. The soundtrack complies with the research of Muzak founder Dan O'Neil. Each of the Muzak segments are ordered from least to most stimulating. The stimulus value of each segment is determined by factors such as tempo, rhythm, instrumentation and orchestra size. The final brightest tune is always followed by fifteen minutes of silence. Farrar suggests that Muzak or 'functional music'; conventionally used in factories, offices, hospitals, banks etc. is designed to suppress anxiety and stress, producing increased work rates and productivity. In an art college environment the effects will be measurable through the atmospheric changes, concurrent experiential reaction from the students and through how much work they produce.